


a thousand years of memories

by aritzen



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 03:02:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26079949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aritzen/pseuds/aritzen
Summary: We are what we remember, but we are also what we have forgotten.
Relationships: Kita Shinsuke/Miya Atsumu, Miya Atsumu & Miya Osamu
Comments: 23
Kudos: 79





	1. Chapter 1

Osamu once told him that at the end of land is water and at the end of water is land, so it doesn’t matter how far or fast he runs, he’ll never reach the end and he’ll never reach it first. He wants to brag that he’s done it, beaten his twin brother in the race to the end of the world, but he’s not at the end and Osamu is not second. He’s just standing by himself on a riverbank outside a village whose name he failed to catch. It’s the farthest south the boatman was willing to take him for the handful of silver coins he had on him.

A day by horse, and then a night and a day by boat. It’s not the farthest Atsumu has traveled from home, but it’s the farthest he’s gone without Osamu in the twenty-four years since they were born. He tugs on the cursed omoidean bracelet tight around his right wrist. Each link is a cut omoidean, a shard of stolen memory, flecked with red, black, and yellow, catching the late afternoon sunlight like a series of broken waves. Cursed to seal the wearer’s magic. Slapped on him by the person he trusted the most.

Without magic, the world flattens into a moving picture. He can see the fire in the sky dancing westward through the clouds and into the mountains. He can hear the farmers in the fields swinging rice paddies against the insides of their harvest carts, one rustling thump after another. He can smell the river and feel the wind, but he can’t sense the undercurrent of emotions in the stream of memories that he knows must be sweeping past him. Can’t reach into the flow to summon his flames that intimidated the whole royal court the year he took the warlock warrior exams. Can’t even dry his boots after he waded ashore.

Atsumu pulls his sleeve over the cursed bracelet and marches down the dirt path along the river. Maybe he’ll encounter another boat that’ll take him farther south, and farther south, until he arrives at the city of Tachibana where Aran is stationed. Aran will know what to do about his bracelet. Unless Aran too has decided to side with the royal court. It won’t shock him. Nothing will after Osamu’s betrayal.

But he’s out of money, and the journey to Tachibana is at least another week by boat. Suddenly the jade pendant attached to his belt seems heavier, always bumping against his thigh with every step he takes. It’s the only item with monetary value left on him, one half of two foxes carved from the same piece of white jade that was a family heirloom split between him and Osamu. If he has to part with it today, well, it’ll be entirely Osamu’s fault for forcing him to flee Rinka with nothing but the clothes on his back.

His stomach growls before nightfall, before he finds the boat to Tachibana. The only fisherman he came across refused his request, citing dangerous rapids ten to fifteen miles down the river. His feet are cold and wet, and mosquitoes gather around him whenever he pauses, and he has no idea if he’s walked past two paddy fields or one because they all look the same green and gold. He stares as a group of farmers heave sacks of rice onto a cart strapped to a mule next to a cleared patch of the field. Maybe, he thinks, he can try this route instead.

He follows the four farmers down muddy and grassy paths, through fields full of chirping crickets, to a shed where he hears the farmers pouring rice onto the floor. One of the farmers, the one who steered the mule earlier, is slouching against the emptied cart, chewing on a stalk of foxtail grass. Too hungry to care about the meaning of mementos, Atsumu unties the jade pendant from his belt and approaches the farmer, who spares him a lackadaisical glance.

He holds up the pendant. “Trade this for your mule and some food.”

The farmer perks up and reaches for the pendant but clicks his tongue when Atsumu jerks it away from him. “Sir, it’s gettin’ dark,” the farmer says as he removes the foxtail grass from his mouth. “I gotta get a closer look at that thing to see what it’s worth.”

_It’s worth the land you’re standing on_ , Atsumu doesn’t say, his throat constricting. He swallows the rising resentment and hands the pendant to the farmer.

The farmer lets out a low whistle as he feels the jade and peers at it under the fading twilight. He nods. “Take the mule,” he says, gesturing behind him as he begins to walk away.

“Wait, what about the food?” Atsumu asks.

“Go ask the rest of ‘em.”

“What?”

“The mule isn’t yours to sell,” says a quiet but stern voice.

Atsumu jumps and turns around to face a second, smaller farmer standing in the doorway of the shed. At this distance, Atsumu can see the dark tips of the farmer’s tousled light hair framing his forehead and temples like the soft strokes of a master calligrapher. _Regal_ is the first word that enters Atsumu’s mind, a word he doesn’t even apply to the reigning king, but there’s something about this farmer that, despite the soiled peasant clothing, hints at the force of receding tides.

“Kita-san,” the first farmer says with a taut smile.

“Give it back to him,” says the farmer named Kita-san.

“Yeah, yeah,” the first farmer murmurs and tosses the pendant back to Atsumu, who scrambles to catch it before it drops to the ground.

“And you,” Kita continues, giving Atsumu another jolt while the first farmer trudges off. “Be mindful next time, or you won’t even know what hit you.”

“What, I—”

“All done here, Shin-chan,” the other two farmers of the group announce as they exit the shed, cutting off Atsumu’s complaint.

Kita inclines his head in response and bids them good night before turning to shut the door to the shed. The two farmers holler after the first one, laughing at him for daring to sell “Shinsuke’s” mule. Atsumu backs away as Kita steps up to the cart to detach it from the mule.

“So... this is your mule?”

“Yes, but I’m not selling.”

Atsumu buries the pendant in his fist, pressing against the smooth contours of the jade fox, and sighs at the sky. The first star twinkles at him, silent. It occurs to him that maybe he should steal the mule. He is, or was, one of the most powerful fire warlocks of the Inari Kingdom, trained in his parents’ regiment up by the northern border, so even though he’s without his magic, he’s fairly confident that he can take on a peasant farmer who’s quite a bit smaller in stature and not that much older than him. He’s already a fugitive anyway, so he might as well be accused of a real crime instead of a false one.

“You’re hungry, aren’t you?” Kita says, having removed the mule’s harness.“I can’t give you the mule, but I can give you something to eat. Come along. Otherwise you might get the idea of stealing our livestock.”

Atsumu blinks hard a few times and stares after Kita Shinsuke the mind reader even though no mage or warlock can read thoughts, only auras. It must be the something about Kita Shinsuke, something that’s beyond auras because it’s not like he can sense auras right now. He wonders what it is.

“Well?” Kita prompts from the main path in front of the shed, one hand on the mule’s halter.

It’s not what he asked for or what he expected, but—Atsumu decides as he joins Kita—he’ll take it.


	2. Chapter 2

Kita leaves the mule at a stable not far from the shed and tells Atsumu that his house is right around the corner, behind the bamboo grove. Sometimes there can be snakes hiding in the grass, Kita warns him, so he should stamp his feet to make some noise if he decides to go out at night. Atsumu is about to say that he has no reason to go out at night in a place like this when it hits him that he has no idea where he’ll be sleeping tonight. He glances at Kita and feels the weight of his pendant. The weight of trust in his hand.

“Can I...” he starts then stops, opting instead to show Kita his pendant. “This is all I have.”

Unlike the other farmer, Kita barely looks at the pendant that appears to be glowing like the moonlight slanting through the bamboos. “I don’t have that much food to give you,” he says.

“Not just the food. I need a place to sleep. Also—”

“It’s still more than what I can provide. You’d be better off taking it to a pawnshop. There’s one in Date.”

“Date?”

“It’s a mining town nine miles south of here. You should be able to find most of what you need, there. As for tonight, all you have to do is help out in the kitchen. Can you do that?”

They pause outside a small house surrounded by a bamboo fence, where the sweet distinct fragrance of osmanthus fills the air. It reminds Atsumu of the osmanthus cake that Osamu makes on occasion that he helps by eating. The memory of the silky dessert makes him hungrier, and he lowers the hand clutching the pendant. “Do I really have a choice?” he asks, meeting Kita’s steady gaze.

“Then come in,” Kita says and pushes open the gate to his house.

Tucking the pendant into a pocket, Atsumu follows Kita past vegetable patches and fruit trees and into the house built with mud bricks. Kita changes out of his straw sandals and snaps his fingers at a candle near the door, lighting it. While he goes around the house to light the oil lamps with the candle, Atsumu can only stare, his mouth dry.

“You’re a mage,” Atsumu says.

“Hm? Ah, yes, kind of.”

“Why don’t you light everything with magic?”

“I don’t have that much magic, so I only use it when necessary.”

“Oh. Seems like a pain,” Atsumu mutters under his breath. As someone who has always overflowed with magic, he wants to light up the house with a single sweep of his hand, let Kita see the amber glow of his eyes that invokes fear in friends and foes alike, but the cold band around his wrist is a callous reminder of the freezing pain that shot up his arm and stopped him from punching Osamu when he tried to burn through the bracelet the day before.

“Why don’t you use omoidean?” Atsumu asks. _Omoidean that isn’t synthetic, that is_ , he amends inwardly, fighting the urge to fiddle with the bracelet. He thinks he can almost taste bile.

“They’re expensive, so I use them even less,” Kita replies as he returns the candle to its holder sitting on the narrow table beside the front door.

“Oh,” says Atsumu.

The house in warm, orange light is simple. There’s a small ancestral altar in the left corner, facing one of the two windows that open to the front yard. A square wooden table is flush with the wall, accompanied by two matching benches and a vase of dried flowers. To the right is a wide entrance to the kitchen and, in the other wall, two closed doors.

“Change your shoes and come with me,” Kita says, pointing to the wooden sandals by Atsumu’s feet.

The sandals are a little small and awkward, but at least he’s finally rid of the damp boots and socks. He enters the kitchen after Kita, sandals clacking. Pots and jars line the shelves. Strings of garlic hang along the wall. A stack of firewood occupies the corner. He washes his hands as told and smells the flatbread before he sees them under the towel that Kita just peeled back from a bowl.

“Here,” Kita says as he hands Atsumu a piece and pours him a cup of water. “Eat something first because dinner will take some time.”

Staring at the food and drink like they’re gifts from the gods, Atsumu blurts out, “You’re gonna make me cry.”

“I’ll take that as a thanks,” Kita says, rinsing a bowl of rice for the clay pot to cook.

The flatbread is a bit dense and dry and a far cry from the gourmet meals he gets at home, but Atsumu wolfs it down anyway. He refills his cup and is about to reach for a second piece of flatbread when Kita shoves a basket of green beans into his arms.

“Wash them and snap off the ends.”

“Right,” Atsumu murmurs, trying to ignore the thought that eating the flatbread made him hungrier, and hunkers down by the bucket of water that Kita indicated. He dumps the green beans into the bucket and realizes a problem: he’ll need to roll up his sleeves to wash them or look like an idiot trying. However, Kita is a mage, not an ignorant mortal without magic, so it’s likely he’ll recognize the omoidean bracelet.

“What’s wrong?” Kita asks as he splits a squash, and Atsumu has to remind himself to breathe. “Do you not know how to wash green beans?”

“What? I know how!” Atsumu protests. Even if Osamu didn’t rope him into helping out in the kitchen, he would’ve learned how to fix meals during his time in the regiment; he just did it with the help of his fire. He frowns. _Whatever_ , he thinks and pushes up his sleeves. The cutting board is quiet, so he knows Kita is watching him. Maybe Kita is more of a peasant than a mage and, in the low light, won’t be able to tell the difference between a normal omoidean bracelet and a cursed one. It’s the flecks that give it away.

His shoulders almost relax when he hears the cutting board again, but then Kita speaks.

“I was wondering if you were robbed by bandits or if you were fleeing from somewhere,” he says. “I see it’s the latter.”

Atsumu scowls. “How can you be so sure?”

“Your clothes give away your status. You’re a member of the nobility. Yet you’re here without money or an entourage, and you look like a mess.”

“Are you going to send me back? Report me to the authorities?” Atsumu asks, his voice gaining an edge.

“No. But I know someone who can lift the curse for you.”

Atsumu stops snapping the green beans and looks up at Kita. “What?”

“We’ll need to wait until the day he’s off duty, but I’m sure he’ll help you if I go with you.”

“Why?”

Kita piles the chunks of squash into a plate. “Why what?”

“Why are you helping me? It’s illegal to remove these things without a pardon.”

Kita’s expression is distant as he looks out the dark window. “Because those things shouldn’t exist in the first place,” he replies, sounding equally distant. He turns to pluck a bulb of garlic from the wall but then settles into the space next to Atsumu. “You’re taking too long,” he says, and the water sloshes around as he starts snapping off the ends of the remaining green beans with the speed of experience.

“Who are you?” Atsumu asks.

“Who are _you_?” Kita counters.

Something must’ve shown on his face because Kita drops his gaze and says, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. You can also leave whenever you want to continue on your original journey if that’s what you prefer. But you’re welcome to stay here tonight.”

Kita tosses the green beans into a plate and sweeps up the discarded bits. As he proceeds to start a fire under the stove with a spark of magic that kindles a slow flame, Atsumu asks, “Aren’t you scared of me? What if I’m a bad guy or something?”

“Are you?” Kita asks, as if he already knows who Atsumu is. As if he already knows what Atsumu did and didn’t do, what Atsumu can and cannot do. The smell of burning wood gradually overwhelms the diffuse aroma of rice. The kitchen grows warm. Kita wipes his brow with his sleeve, and a strand of hair sticks to his temple in so careless a manner that Atsumu almost extends his hand. The next words escape him, like a kite that’s broken free.

“I’m Atsumu.”

“What?”

“I’m Atsumu,” he repeats.

He is Miya Atsumu, the fire warlock, the brash twin, the one who called the royal court _a whole bunch of imbeciles_ (because that’s who they are), and the one who’s going to get back at Miya Osamu. But until he can, he finds that he doesn’t want people to know that he’s from the Miya family, that his twin brother is the one who did this to him, that the synthetic omoidean that makes up his bracelet contains Osamu’s memories of the two of them. Still, he wants Kita to at least know his name.

“Atsumu,” Kita says, nudging him back into the present time. “I see. I’m Kita Shinsuke.”

“I figured that out already,” Atsumu mutters. And maybe it’s only a trick of the light, but he’s pretty sure he saw Kita’s expression soften into a smile. A gentle tug that he wants to see again.


	3. Chapter 3

Atsumu learns at dinner that Kita Shinsuke is an only child raised by his grandmother, who passed away a year ago; his parents died while treating villagers in the plague that struck seventeen years ago, when he was nine. Of course he misses them, he answers Atsumu, but no one lives forever. Everyone will leave sooner or later. Granny, at least, left in peace.

“Granny believed in the spirits,” he tells Atsumu after dinner, after Atsumu has taken a bath and finds him cleaning the ancestral altar. “She believed that wiping away the dust sets them free and lets them watch over us.” He pauses mid-motion, as if remembering something, left hand holding one of the clay oil lamps and right hand gripping the damp towel, but then he replaces the oil lamp and regards the linen pajamas he borrowed from a neighbor for Atsumu to wear. “It’s too big for you, isn’t it?”

“It’s too scratchy,” Atsumu grumbles, scratching above his shoulder. “And it smells funny.”

“You’ll have to go to Rinka or Tachibana to find the silk you like,” Kita says dryly. Before Atsumu can say that that wasn’t what he meant, Kita points to the open door behind Atsumu and says, “That room is for you. The bed’s ready, so get some rest. Your clothes will be dry in the morning. I’m going to take a bath.” He picks up the bucket of water on the floor and disappears to the back of the house.

The other door to the left of the open door remains shut, and Atsumu guesses that it’s Kita’s bedroom because there’s nothing but an outhouse beyond the kitchen. Out of curiosity, he pivots on his heels and goes up to the altar.

Three spirit tablets reside on two levels: the one for Kita’s grandmother at the center of the higher level, and the two for his parents on the lower level with the one for his father on the left. In front of each is a clay oil lamp, but now that Atsumu is in front of them, he sees that they aren’t oil lamps at all. The wick is a granule of taimatsu rock, the source of eternal flames found in the Tenko Mountains north of Rinka, where the River of Oblivion originates. It’s similar to the ghost fire that burns without heat and without smoke along the cliffs carved out by the River of Oblivion, but it’s warm yellow instead of pale blue, and it captures memories instead of converting them into omoidean. He should’ve known—the commoners, especially the mortals, worship ancestral spirits and believe that without the eternal flames, the spirits will grow hungry and start to steal the memories of their descendants. How does the folk song go? _They leave ‘em on the cliffs, hide ‘em in the mountains; so hop in your lil’ ships, go visit the gardens..._

It’s a song about how omoidean forms, except Atsumu never did understand the line about the gardens.

Studying the names inscribed in gold on the polished ebony tablets, Atsumu wonders what it’d feel like to stand here without the shackle on his magic. Eternal flames are notorious for their ability to amplify lingering emotions, but all he feels right now is the cooler night temperature, and all that lingers around him is the scent of incense burning on the altar.

He twists the bracelet around his wrist and heads to the room prepared for him. A more floral brand of incense permeates the warmer air here, and Atsumu spots a ceramic censer burning what’s likely some sort of mosquito repellent on the table in the corner, next to an old closet. Between the censer and the oil lamp is his pendant that he has evidently forgotten to remove from the pocket of his clothes before he bathed. He glances out the door to look for Kita, but only flickering shadows answer him.

He closes the creaky door and is about to extinguish the lamp when he decides to look in the closet first. It smells of old wood, musty like the clothes he’s currently wearing. There’s a spare straw hat, an extra blanket, a few towels, and, to his surprise, a set of embroidered handkerchiefs. He unfolds one. It’s not silk or satin, not the usual motifs of birds and flowers, and not as colorful or delicate, the red and black threads stitched into a pattern that resembles a person dancing around a bonfire. Maybe it’s folk art. He returns it to the closet, where it lays crooked on top of the rest.

He blows out the lamp and flops onto the bed. It’s harder than the bed he’s used to, and—he sits up. It’s warm. There are heated beds made of bricks in the northern parts of the kingdom, but this is a wooden bed with an empty space underneath. He pulls back the sheets and touches the warm solid surface that turns out to be etched with something. Out of habit, he tries to summon a flame to help him see, but the pain that stuns him is like a plunge into a frozen lake. He crumples to the bed and groans, his mind filled with a vignette of him and Osamu having a snowball fight when they were sixteen. Osamu remembers it differently from how he remembers it: there’s annoyance in the beginning at getting hit in the back by a snowball, and then there’s satisfaction from ignoring Atsumu’s demand to use no magic because Osamu has field advantage as an ice warlock.

“Fuckin’ ‘Samu...” Atsumu whispers, right arm thrown over his eyes, the bracelet cold against his skin.

He trembles.

It’s not fair. It’s not fair for Osamu to forget this.

#

The avalanche that Osamu triggered is on the verge of swallowing him whole when Atsumu jolts awake, his heart racing. He can still see the animosity in the amber glow of Osamu’s eyes even though he has no recollection of how their fight escalated in the dream. Or rather, he doesn’t want to remember.

There’s a faded scar above his left eyebrow in the same way there’s a faded but uglier scar on Osamu’s left forearm from a fistfight that got out of hand when they were five or six. Their parents yanked them apart before it could get worse, and gave them both an earful about their discipline afterwards, but as a result, they’ve never used deadly magic on each other again in the numerous fights that were inevitable throughout the years. So Atsumu knows that a dream is just a dream. Osamu won’t really try to kill him, won’t really try to hurt him, won’t really try to take away what’s most important to him—except he did. It just bothers him that the last words Osamu said to him were: _You have enough time to leave Rinka if you go now._

As if Osamu was trying to help him.

At the time, he was too shocked, too angry to consider the circumstances involved in Osamu’s decisions, but now, in the quiet hours before dawn, temporarily warm and safe, he replays the events leading up to this, trying to uncover some sort of clue, but the only exchange they had about this occurred a few days prior, when Osamu caught up to him outside the palace and said: _Do_ _you_ _have any idea_ _what you just did,_ _you loon?_ To that, Atsumu huffed in response and asked what he was so afraid of, but Osamu glowered at him and stalked off. It’s not as if he and Osamu can’t take on the royal court if they absolutely have to, and it’s not as if Osamu didn’t silently agree with what Atsumu declared out loud, so Atsumu doesn’t get what Osamu was so worried about. Not then, not now.

A dull sound comes from somewhere in the house, and he lifts his head from the pillow with a frown. Is it his imagination or is it Kita? He rolls onto his stomach, wincing at the soreness from the long-distance travel, and sees the faint sliver of light slipping through the crack under the door. It must be Kita. What time is it anyway? It’s dark outside the window. Lying still, he listens for the sounds of movement, hears the soft clack of wooden sandals and a splash of water. His heart that’s calmed down since the dream is pounding again, as if it’s a terrible crime to be caught awake for no good reason.

He wonders what Kita is doing in the silence that follows. Casting the blanket aside, he swings his feet to the floor and pulls open the door with a creak. Cool air rushes in. Other than the eternal flames at the altar, the light is from the kitchen. Kita appears around the corner, his sleeves rolled up.

“You’re up earlier than I expected,” Kita remarks.

“ _You’re_ up early.”

“It’s normal for me.”

“What time is it?”

“Should be a little past five,” Kita says and returns to whatever he was doing in the kitchen. “Breakfast isn’t ready yet, but it should be once you’re done washing up. Did you see your clothes by the table?”

Atsumu looks. Resting on the bench is his outfit from yesterday, black silk with gold embroidery, folded into a neat stack. He catches a whiff of steamed rice as he passes through the kitchen with his clothes in his arms, and stops when he realizes what Kita is making at the counter. “Onigiri?”

“This is for lunch since I won’t have time to cook during the day.”

“Oh, right, the harvest.”

He watches Kita fill an onigiri with umeboshi but quickly averts his gaze and scurries out the back door when Kita gives him a questioning look. He doesn’t want to explain that his twin brother, whose favorite food is food, has a special fondness for onigiri while he himself has a special fondness for the spicy tuna onigiri that Osamu makes. Osamu revealed once a long time ago, on a snowy winter solstice night, that if he could, he would open an onigiri shop. When Atsumu asked him why not, Osamu stopped sculpting snow onigiri with his magic, the wind carrying away his foggy breath and the lively chatter of the other soldiers in the regiment as they helped themselves to a round of steaming dumplings. _What’s the point,_ Osamu finally asked in return, kicking at the snow, _when war can break out_ _any time_ _?_

_Then deal with it when the time comes_ , Atsumu told him back then, which is what he’ll still tell him now, because there’s no point dwelling on hypotheticals. The reality is that the war started years before they became adults, emerging in pockets and continuing as concessions. Yet life goes on.

The eastern sky has yet to cast off the remnants of darkness when Atsumu, dressed in his clothes that smell vaguely of soap beans, makes his way back to the kitchen. Kita is wrapping a few onigiri in paper. 

“This is for you,” he says as he ties a cord around the packet. “If you want to leave today, I can pack some flatbread for you too.” He meets Atsumu’s eyes. “The person who can lift the curse for you will be in the village the day after tomorrow for the Moon Festival, so you’re welcome to stay until then. Let me know what you decide.”

_Oh, right, the bracelet._ Biting his lower lip, Atsumu weighs his two options while Kita stows the jar of umeboshi on the shelf and ladles the breakfast porridge into two bowls. Tachibana is a week away, but it’ll probably take him longer to reach the city, and it’s not guaranteed that Aran will help him. Kita is less of a stranger now, but a part of Atsumu reminds himself that he can’t even trust Osamu anymore. His cynicism dissipates when Kita hands him two plates to bring to the dining table, a plate of pickled radish and a plate of smoked sausage slices. He doesn’t know why, but the thought of leaving a place like this with its mosquitoes and simple food and modest accommodation feels like he’s tearing a hole in the fabric of memories. At the very least, he thinks, he needs to know what Kita’s aura is like before he goes.

He sits down at the table across from Kita, waits for Kita to finish paying his respects to the spirits, eyes closed and palms together, and then says, “I think I’ll stay.”

“Okay.”

Chewing on a slice of the salty smoked sausage, he finds the next two words to say to Kita: “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Kita replies, the corners of his eyes and mouth curving ever so slightly.

Not quite a smile, Atsumu decides, but getting there.

#

After breakfast, while Atsumu dries the dishes that Kita is rinsing, Kita asks, “What will you do after the curse is lifted?”

_Kill ‘Samu_ , Atsumu almost says, lips already parted, but that will invite too many questions, so he settles on an indirect “Go back to Rinka, I guess.”

Once he recovers his magic, he’ll have almost nothing to fear. The royal court can send their best guards, best mages, best warlocks, and only Osamu will make him break a sweat, but Osamu is the one he wants to beat anyway. Everything else is irrelevant.

“Won’t they put another bracelet on you?”

Atsumu scoffs. “As if they can. They only got me this time because—” _Because ‘Samu._ Because he let his guard down around Osamu. Because he never had his guard up around Osamu. Because of all the things he’s willing to burn to ashes, his brother’s memories are not one of them.

Brows furrowed, Atsumu stacks the cleaned dishes on the shelf and asks, “Do you know how they make those bracelets?”

All Atsumu knows is that there are two steps, one more secretive than the other. The curse itself is a key that most magistrates or prison wardens can wield if they’re mages, whereas the synthetic omoidean is something that only a handful of elite mages can create. Suna Rintarou, the magistrate of the capital city Rinka, is one of the few who can do both.

“No, I don’t,” Kita replies as he wipes his hands on a towel.

“But the person you know must know.”

“You’ll have to ask him yourself.” Kita pauses. “What’re you thinking?”

“Just... I don’t really know either.”

Did Osamu ask Suna to do this? Did Osamu choose which memories to give up? Did he have a say at all?

“Well, I need to head out to the fields,” Kita says, putting down his sleeves. “What’s your plan for today?”

“Today? Uh...” Atsumu’s hand strays to where his pendant normally dangles, his fingers curling around air. The day after tomorrow simultaneously seems as far as Tachibana and as close as Kita standing an arm’s length away from him. Wherever he goes after this, whether he returns to Rinka or not, he’s going to need money, perhaps more than he needs magic. “Didn’t you say there’s a pawnshop in Date? How do I get there?”

Kita hesitates. When he speaks, his voice is lower than usual. “Are you going to give up your pendant?”

“I need money, and it’s not like I have anything else.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“Hang on. Why do you care?”

“I don’t have that much magic, but when I found it in your pocket yesterday, even I could tell how much attachment it holds. It must be really important to you.”

“Yeah, well, it’s all ‘Samu—” Atsumu clamps his mouth shut, fists clenched, but when Kita doesn’t react, he throws up his arms and says, “It’s just a pawnshop anyway. I can get it back if I have to.”

“That is true,” Kita says. “Let’s go then. It’ll be easier for you if you catch one of the fishing boats on their way to the morning market.”

#

Kita lends him the spare straw hat from the closet in his room, pinning a black gauze veil to it to conceal his face from view. The village has received no news of any fugitives, but Date is a town large enough to have a magistrate who’ll be better informed of the latest happenings throughout the kingdom. Atsumu thinks it’s silly, because the average person can’t tell him apart from his twin brother, but it’s not as if he can explain this to Kita without disclosing more than he already has. Instead, he complains that he can’t see as well and lifts the veil over the hat, promising to put it down after he arrives at Date. Pocketing the pendant, he walks out the door with Kita.

The sky is a dim light blue as they make their way to the riverbank, where Kita waves to an approaching fishing boat from the top of the levee.

“Kita-san!” greets the fisherman clad in a straw cape. He’s younger than the middle-aged fisherman that Atsumu encountered the day before, his cropped hair the color of silver.

“Gin,” Kita calls out. “Do you mind taking a passenger to Date and back?”

The fisherman glances at Atsumu. “Him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t mind. Does he mind?” Gin gestures at the crates of fish and the fishing net. “This smells, y’know.”

“It’s fine,” Atsumu replies, feeling Kita’s gaze on him.

“Alrighty then,” Gin says. He studies the steep grassy levee and adds, “It’s not easy for you to get on here. Why don’t you go that way? There should be a small dock ten minutes from here.”

Kita nods to Atsumu. “Ginjima is a good person,” he tells Atsumu. “If he’ll take you there, he’ll bring you back. Once you enter town, take a right at the first intersection. That’s where the closest pawnshop is.”

“Got it,” Atsumu says. “Thanks.”

Kita nods again in acknowledgment and gives his gratitude to Ginjima, who raises his hand and shouts back, “Anything for Kita-san!”

Atsumu takes off, following the fishing boat and the flow of the murky river. The first time he looks over his shoulder, Kita is watching him, but the second time he looks back, Kita is no longer on the riverbank. He pauses briefly before continuing down the uneven dirt path.

“So who’re you again?” Ginjima asks after he boards the flat-bottomed boat lit with two paper lanterns.

“Atsumu,” he replies. Wrinkling his nose at the fishy stench that’s worse than he imagined, he steps over the wet spots on the rocking boat and perches himself on a stool near Ginjima. Like yesterday, the air is colder over the water. Unlike yesterday, the person at the helm is regarding him with a curiosity beyond the idle sort that most have for the status attached to his attire.

“How do you know Kita-san?” Ginjima asks, steering the boat down the river.

_I almost stole his mule_ , Atsumu answers in his head. He pushes aside the veil that the wind has blown to his face as he considers how to phrase _I met him yesterday_ without arousing suspicions.

“Never mind,” Ginjima says with a laugh. “Thought you might’ve been another stray Kita-san picked up. That’s why I asked.”

“Stray?”

“Yeah. Kita-san finds one every now and then.”

“I’m not a dog.”

“I know, I know.”

Atsumu frowns when Ginjima doesn’t elaborate. Is he a stray? Maybe he is one. What is a stray? “Are you a stray Kita-san picked up?” he asks.

“Me? Naw, not really. I grew up around here.”

“Why does Kita-san pick up strays?”

Ginjima shrugs. “It’s Kita-san.”

_It’s Kita-san._

In Atsumu’s opinion, it doesn’t explain anything, but at the same time, it seems to explain everything. He thinks about Ginjima’s words “anything for Kita-san,” wonders who the other strays are and where they are, why a peasant farmer knows someone who can undo the cursed bracelet, why it bothers him that he may not be the first one Kita has helped like this.

The rest of the boat ride is silent save for the steady strokes of the oar and the waves lapping at the hull. The mountain slopes layered in green, orange, and red foliage grow steeper the farther they travel, until earth gives way to precipice, where the pale blue flames of ghost fire drift along the jagged surface like fireflies, leaving iridescent omoidean wherever they settle.

Ginjima steers the boat to the docks. He tells Atsumu that he’ll wait for him here before he turns to join a dozen other fishermen in their noisy exchange with the fishmongers. Atsumu lowers his veil and picks his way through the crowd of fishmongers and merchants unloading goods and transporting them up the steep slope to the walled town of Date. The gates open shortly after he arrives. The guards wave him through, stopping only carts and wagons for a cursory inspection. He walks past the bulletin board next to the gates but, after a pause, swivels around to read the notices.

There’s nothing about him. The only wanted poster is for the underground leader nicknamed the Little Crow. It’s an old one that he’s seen in Rinka for weeks, but as far as he knows, nobody has offered any reliable information on the identity or even the appearance of the Little Crow. He’s curious himself, but rumors say that the Little Crow operates out of both Tachibana and Rinka, that the Little Crow is both a mage and a warlock, that the Little Crow is not a leader but a decoy, among other contradictory claims. He’s doubted the existence of the Little Crow before, but if the royal court and Osamu are really going to declare him an enemy, he finds himself thinking that it’s a viable option to seek out the other side to win whatever this is.

But first, he needs money.


	4. Chapter 4

Futakuchi’s Pawnshop is the second store front to his left after he takes a right at the first intersection. He surveys the shuttered store front and all the other shuttered store fronts on the largely empty street and figures that he’s too early. Even the sun has yet to grace the town with its presence from behind the mountains. He removes his hat and returns to the street where he entered, deciding to follow the trail of merchants and their goods to their destination.

Food stalls flank the narrow cobblestone street, serving incoming merchants and outgoing miners with steamed buns, fried breadsticks, and porridge that make Atsumu’s stomach rumble even though he just ate not too long ago. He stares at the fresh flower pastries that smell of rose that a hawker is laying out and touting as a local specialty, mourns the spicy yet plain broad noodles that another hawker is ladling into a bowl in exchange for a few copper coins. In a huff, he turns onto a quieter street that runs along a shallow canal to escape the allure of the food he cannot have.

Red lanterns sway in the breeze, and small bells chime above the closed carved wood doors. Omoidean shops. Atsumu wonders how they compare to the larger ones in Rinka that sell omoidean as ornaments, talismans, jewelries. Warlocks don’t really need them, but mages do. Aran likes his sword hilt encrusted with omoidean; Suna is lazy and buys them as marbles in a box. Each has a trusted supplier who knows which type of omoidean they’re most compatible with and which will burn them like the synthetic ones do. The bracelet is heavy on Atsumu’s wrist, and he finds himself mulling over an idea that no warlocks or mages have ever mentioned in person or in books—at least not the ones he’s encountered. Forgotten memories are consumed as magic, so there is no value in recovering those memories, but in principle, if there’s magic to steal memories, shouldn’t there also be magic to restore them?

Not that it matters if Osamu consented. Not that it’s easier if Osamu didn’t.

The deep boom of a drum resonates through the streets, again and again. Following the sound, Atsumu cuts through an alley between the stained white walls of an inn and a teahouse and emerges in a square where the magistrate office occupies the north end. The marble gateway with three openings is guarded by four stone lions, the blue panel above the center inscribed with the word _VIRTUE_ in gold. To the right, in front of a blank wall, is the magistrate’s assembly drum that a petite woman is striking.

Atsumu lifts a brow at the sight of the woman’s patched dress and kerchief of the same taupe. Assembly drums are meant for military emergencies or urgent crises, so while it’s not impossible, it’s improbable that a commoner holds the justification for striking the drum.

The guard rushing out with a spear seems to share the same thought as he demands, “Who do you think you are?”

The woman throws herself at the guard’s feet, but whatever she’s saying is muffled by the cobblestones, heard only by the guard.

“Come back at ten! The magistrate will see you then,” the guard exclaims and has to wrench his leg free from the crying woman’s clutches when he attempts to leave. Shooing a few other guards back to their posts, he disappears into the office compound.

The woman, left sprawled on the ground, slowly pushes herself up to sit on her heels. Atsumu expects her to get up and leave, but after she wipes her eyes and heaves a sigh, she lowers her forehead to the ground again, hands folded underneath. A few onlookers walk past her. The staff of an eatery along the square discuss among themselves and disperse from the steps where they gathered in the beginning.

Atsumu turns to leave as well but gives the woman and the magistrate office one last glance. The guard was lenient. Atsumu remembers witnessing a similar scene in Rinka last year, someone begging for a reinvestigation of some murder case, but Suna had the guards haul them off the front steps. Whether it was to the dungeons or the street corner, Atsumu can’t recall, but he also didn’t care at the time. Now, as he tries to dig his fingers under the cursed bracelet as though it’s possible to pry it off with brute force, he can’t help but think how stupid these people are. If pleading for help is so easy, he wouldn’t be where he is. Defenseless against the very people who were once his allies.

He shakes his sleeve loose and retraces his steps to the pawnshop in hopes that it’s open by now.

It isn’t, so he wanders down the same street, taking note of clothing shops and tailors. On his way back, a potion shop opens, a servant enters an apothecary, a beggar holds up a chipped bowl with a couple of copper coins in it. Futakuchi’s Pawnshop is also finally open.

The pawnbroker, a man with short brown hair and appearing half a foot taller on the elevated platform, is clearing space for a porcelain vase on a shelf full of assorted potteries. A landscape painting hangs on the wall behind the counter, next to a shelf of bronze wine cups and ceramic tea sets. In the corner is a pile of clothes and furniture. A young, bright-eyed assistant manipulating an abacus notices Atsumu and whispers to the pawnbroker, “Futakuchi-san!”

Futakuchi turns around and eyes Atsumu. “Here to get a loan or pay one off?”

Atsumu reaches into the pocket behind his lapel and feels the attachment that Kita mentioned not in the pendant itself but as an invisible punch to his chest. Gritting his teeth, he claps the pendant down on the counter. “How much for this?”

“Huh,” Futakuchi says and inspects the pendant under the light. Then he scans Atsumu from head to toe. “I can give you fifty silver coins for this.”

“Only fifty?” Atsumu exclaims. “Do you know how much the pendant’s actually worth?”

“Hey, take it or leave it. Most places won’t even take your pendant because of how much it’s worth. Not a lot of people can pay for this if you can’t pay off your loan, y’know.”

“Oh, I’ll pay it off alright.”

“You sure about that? I’ve seen my fair share of rich nobles who lost everything overnight.”

Glaring at Futakuchi, Atsumu grabs the pendant from the counter but then feels as though he’ll have lost if he walks out, so he sets it back on the counter and says, “Fine. I’ll take fifty.”

“Just so you know, it’s three percent monthly interest plus fees. I’ll hold it for three months.”

“I won’t even need one month.”

“Wow, bold words. Hope you won’t have to eat them. Sakunami,” Futakuchi addresses the assistant and hands him the pendant. “Write him a slip and give him fifty silver coins.”

“Yessir.”

Atsumu curls his lips and vows to return within two weeks. With his magic at hand.

While he waits, Atsumu calculates what he can buy with fifty silver coins. He should be able to purchase two commoner outfits with less than ten silver coins. Maybe offer something to Ginjima. Knowing Kita, he’ll refuse money and possibly gifts, but Atsumu really wants to give him something, even if it’s slightly extravagant. Maybe mooncake for the Moon Festival. Can peasant farmers afford mooncake?

Sakunami passes five rolls of coins and a loan slip to Atsumu, who pockets everything and heads out to the street. He squints at the rising sun and starts toward the closest clothing shop when he notices the group of guards marching in his direction. He spins around, clutching his hat with the veil, and takes a deep breath as he reminds himself to walk normally. At the intersection, he hears the decisive footsteps of the armored guards come to a halt. And then: “Where’s Futakuchi Kenji?”

Atsumu looks over his shoulder in surprise. So they aren’t after him. The guards usher Futakuchi out of the pawnshop despite the pawnbroker’s strong objections while Sakunami watches helplessly from the shop entrance. The passersby all stop to stare, but most shrug when someone asks about the situation. Atsumu is briefly concerned about his pendant, but when Sakunami returns to the shop, he decides that maybe it’s fine. It’s not as if he can do anything about it right now. He contemplates his hat, chooses not to wear it, and starts again toward the clothing shop.

#

He ends up buying a coin pouch, two sets of outfits, and a box of mooncake. Given the amount of time he took, he wonders if it’s possible that Ginjima left without him. There is only one boat moored to the end of the deserted docks, but Atsumu recognizes the flat-bottomed boat with two paper lanterns. Ginjima is snoozing on the deck, hands cushioning the back of his head and a straw hat covering his face.

“Hey. Gin. Ginjima.”

Ginjima bolts upright, sending his hat tumbling to his feet, and blinks at Atsumu. “Oh, hey. You’re back. Took you long enough.”

“Yeah, well, the shops don’t open that early,” Atsumu says as he steps onto the boat emptied of fish.

Yawning, Ginjima stretches and glances at the items in Atsumu’s arms. “Got everything you need?”

“Yeah, kinda.”

“Alrighty then. Back we go.”

After Atsumu settles into his spot, Ginjima retrieves the mooring line and propels the boat upstream. In the sun, the raw omoidean on the cliffs glimmer gold and white, the ghost fire dimmed to a shimmering film. A piece of omoidean shatters and the fragments disappear into the river named for the memories dissolved into oblivion. A few minutes later, Atsumu breaks the silence.

“Will you be able to take me to Rinka if I paid you?”

“Rinka? On this boat? Naw. You could try one of the merchant ships that dock at Date, though.”

“Hmm, that might work, I guess. What do you want in return for this trip?”

“Huh? You mean like a payment or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t want any. I’m not really doing this for you anyway. I’m doing this for Kita-san.”

“Kita-san? Why?”

Ginjima looks away, and Atsumu half-expects the non-answer _It’s Kita-san_ , but this time Ginjima says, “If it weren’t for Kita-san’s parents, my family would’ve died in the plague years ago.”

_Oh._

“Kita-san always says he’s not the one who did anything, so we shouldn’t feel indebted, but it’s hard not to, y’know, when he lost his parents to the same plague. So I do whatever I can for Kita-san.”

Atsumu prods at a corner of the mooncake box. He supposes he’s doing whatever he can too. Back at the bakery, he decided to pick one of each flavor for the mooncake because he has no idea what Kita likes, if Kita likes mooncake at all. It seems meaningless to ask because he’s leaving in two days and may never come back, but he asks anyway. “Do you know what Kita-san likes?”

“What Kita-san likes? Good question.” Ginjima thinks for a moment. “I think he likes tofu.”

“Tofu?”

“Yeah, and I know he likes the fishcake my family makes for New Year. Other than that, I’m not so sure.”

“Do you know what he doesn’t like, then?”

“Uh, the chaos in the world, maybe?” Ginjima says with a chortle. “I don’t actually know. But if you find out, I want to know.”

Atsumu snorts. “What makes you think I’ll find out?”

“The fact that you’re asking these questions to begin with. You’re no simple stray.”

“I’m not—” Suddenly, Atsumu isn’t sure what he is and isn’t. “What happened to all the other strays?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, where are they?” _Who are they?_

“It’s probably better to ask Kita-san that. I just know they go to places.”

“To do what?”

“Well, what’re _you_ doing?”

Atsumu turns away from Ginjima and leans his shoulder against the side of the boat, refusing to answer. What he’s doing has nothing to do with Kita Shinsuke. Perhaps that’s also the case with the other strays. Just people going to places and needing a little bit of assistance along the way.

_Whatever._

#

Ginjima drops him off at the small dock near the village. He treks back to the village, hesitating at times at the indistinguishable harvest fields. A group of farmers burst into song and laughter, and he searches the fields, the huts, the hills for a familiar figure, a familiar landmark. Finally, he locates the house that’s the color of rice husk in front of a bamboo grove. He continues forward, past the cleared fields, until he reaches a patch where another group of farmers is working. He doesn’t see Kita at first among the bent backs, straw hats, and peasant garb. It’s not the lanky one threshing rice at the cart, not the one whose face is lined with wrinkles, taking a sip of water. A middle-aged woman tying a bundle of paddies notice Atsumu and whispers loudly over her shoulder, “Psst, Shin-chan!”

Kita straightens up and looks in Atsumu’s direction. For an instant, although it sounds absurd, Atsumu believes that Kita is not a farmer holding a sickle but an embattled warrior wielding a crescent sword. His breath stills. He can’t tell if he should be disappointed or relieved that Kita Shinsuke wasn’t born into an elite mage family. In fact, is Kita really who he says he is, or is he withholding his powers?

“You’re back,” says Kita.

“I’m back.”

“Why don’t you go back to the house first? The door’s not locked. I’ll be back at lunchtime. You can also eat first if you’re hungry.”

“Oh, okay,” Atsumu says, but Kita has already returned to his task and may or may not have heard him.

Atsumu watches Kita for a few seconds, waiting for something that never happens because it’s not as if he can name what it is, and treads back to the house. He places the box of mooncake on the dining table and changes out of the silk attire that inadvertently betrays his status. He opens the window in his room to let in the cool, fresh air diffusing the scent of osmanthus, mild yet rich. Autumn. Taking a seat on the bed, he wonders how much of this will slip away from him one day and wind up on the cliffs along the River of Oblivion. It must be boredom, he thinks, because he’s never cared before.

The warmth under his palms suddenly reminds him of the heated bed. He yanks back the sheets and the thin mattress. The wooden panel underneath is carved with thick lines inked in black. He strips the bed and discovers that, when viewed from the foot of the bed, the pattern shows a person dancing around a bonfire. It’s identical to the design on the embroidered handkerchief. He snatches up the handkerchief from the closet and confirms that the two designs match except for the colors. The bonfire is red on the handkerchief but black on the wooden panel.

“Black ink,” he mutters.

The witches and wizards of the Itachiyama Empire cast spells using magic circles drawn in invocation ink that happens to be black. The design on the wooden panel bears some resemblance to those magic circles, but it’s not as intricate and it’s not in a circle. Itachiyama magic also isn’t compatible with Inari magic. He tried it a couple years ago, an Itachiyama spell to light a candle, but he couldn’t complete the magic circle without feeling like there was a needle piercing his skin and being dragged up his forearm. Osamu described it as ants crawling over his hand, whereas Aran said it was like using an incompatible omoidean. Since it can permanently damage a mage’s magic if they’re not careful, the elite mages reject Itachiyama magic much more than the warlocks do in spite of the two wars lost to Itachiyama in the last few decades. It can’t be Itachiyama magic, Atsumu thinks as he traces the inked groove bordering the wooden panel, but it has to be related. Why does Kita know it? What are those handkerchiefs?

He looks through the rest of the handkerchiefs. One shows two people leaping off a rug, trying to grab a pair of hooks. Another depicts either a swallow above a cow head or a fish on top of a scorpion. He flips that one around and upside down but is unable to decipher it further. The rest don’t resemble anything, comprised of intersecting lines, open rectangles, ovals, and arcs. A little like the ornate lattice windows of the pavilions in Rinka but with less regularity.

The pillow on top of the pile of blanket and sheets on the table topples over. Atsumu picks it up, glances at the handkerchiefs strewn over the stripped bed, and suspects that he should probably try to restore the room to its original state before Kita comes back.

He folds the handkerchiefs, puts them back in the closet, and lays down the mattress. He’s straightening the sheets when a girl calls out Kita’s name. The girl has short orange hair and is running up to Kita at the gate, carrying a basket on her back. She shows Kita the contents in the basket and grins. Whatever Kita says in reply is absorbed by the trees. The girl follows Kita into the front yard, chirruping, and skips ahead through the vegetable patch. They continue to the back of the house. Atsumu hesitates, throws the pillow onto the bed, and hurries to the back of the house as well.

The girl is pouring the contents of her basket into one of Kita’s baskets near the water barrels. There’s a pile of dried bamboos along the fence, a chicken coop on the other side of the backyard, not far from the outhouse, a stone oven against the outside wall of the kitchen, a storage hut. The bamboo grove behind the backyard is a tall wall of rustling green.

“Do you want to spend the Moon Festival with us, Kita-san?” the girl is asking.

“Thank you, but not this year. Oomimi will be visiting, and I have a guest.” Kita looks up to find Atsumu dawdling by the well. “And there he is. What brings you out here?”

Atsumu clears his throat while the girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, stares at him with round eyes. “I was... bored,” he says. It’s not quite the truth, but the truth lies somewhere between the desire to learn what’s going on and the urge to see Kita.

“In that case,” Kita says, his hat hiding part of his face as he focuses on the basket, “you can help me shell these chestnuts in the afternoon.”

“Chestnuts?”

“Yes. Come take a look.” Kita picks up a cracked green burr from the basket. “Natsu picked these. We can roast them tonight if you want.”

“Those are chestnuts?”

The girl giggles. “You’ve never seen them before?”

Kita steps on the spiky husk, and a few brown nuts pop out. He holds them in his palm. “Recognize them now?”

“I didn’t know that’s how they look like raw,” Atsumu mutters as Kita tosses the nuts into the basket.

“Now you know,” Kita says.

“They grow on trees,” Natsu supplies helpfully.

“Right,” Atsumu says, even though he’s never thought about where chestnuts come from before.

“Well, I’m off then, Kita-san,” Natsu says, strapping her basket around her shoulders. “See you later!”

“Don’t forget to pick something from the garden, and thank you for the chestnuts.”

Natsu beams and runs off with a wave.

“She seems pretty happy,” Atsumu observes.

“Like the sun in the summer,” Kita says quietly. “Have you eaten yet?”

Atsumu shakes his head.

“Then let’s get lunch.”


	5. Chapter 5

Atsumu is recounting his morning at Date when Kita brings out their lunch and discovers the box on the dining table.

“Oh yeah, I bought that for you,” Atsumu says as he moves the box out of the way for the onigiri. “Um, do you like mooncake?”

“Thank you, but you shouldn’t have.”

Atsumu pauses. Tries to read Kita’s lack of expression but fails. He takes his seat at the table. “Does that mean you don’t like mooncake?”

Kita picks up an onigiri from the plate after his routine prayer to the spirits. “It’s not that. Shouldn’t you spend the money on something more important?”

“But this _is_ important,” Atsumu retorts, staring back at Kita with a conviction that nearly wavers before the slight quirk of Kita’s thin eyebrows. “I... I figured that if you didn’t like mooncake, I could still bring it with me to eat on the road or something. Food is always important. So do you like it or not?”

There’s a twinkle in Kita’s eyes, and for the first time in his life, Atsumu thinks it’s a pity that the mages’ eyes don’t glow like the warlocks’ do when they use magic. Because if they did, maybe it wouldn’t seem like it’s a glimpse into the impossible when he peers into the eyes that are a shade lighter than chestnut.

“I do,” Kita replies and bites into the onigiri in his hand.

“What kind?”

“Mixed nuts.”

“Mixed nuts? The most traditional kind, huh. Should’ve just gotten that if I’d known,” Atsumu mumbles around a mouthful of onigiri and checks the flavors in the box. “Lotus, bean paste... Osmanthus? That’s rare. ‘Samu would—” Catching his slip, Atsumu stuffs the rest of the onigiri into his mouth and swallows it with the unspoken words: Osamu would be interested, in the same way he was interested in the snow skin mooncake that he later perfected. Osamu would be interested in the onigiri too, Atsumu thinks as the rice and the salt and the sour plum blend into a subtle, addictive sweetness in his mouth.

Kita doesn’t say anything, and Atsumu wonders if Kita will ever ask who this “Samu” is. A part of him is relieved that Kita doesn’t bring it up, but a part of him is also strangely disappointed. It makes him want to ask why Kita doesn’t ask, even if he risks revealing everything in the process.

“There’s something you want to say,” Kita remarks.

Atsumu chokes on his second onigiri. “N-no, there isn’t!”

Kita tilts his head while Atsumu’s heart hammers. If there’s a truth spell that a mage can cast by a single look, it’d be the one that Kita is giving him. A lodestone for confessions.

“I... I was just thinking... y’know... the thing... with the bed. What kind of magic is that?” Atsumu points to his room with a newfound determination, because ultimately, there is no truth spell other than the one that requires aura contact, thereby exposing both sides to more vulnerabilities than secrets.

Kita stops chewing for a moment, his gaze trailing in the direction that Atsumu is pointing. He swallows. “You mean the runes?”

The directness of the response surprises Atsumu. “Runes?”

“Have you heard of the sorcerers?”

“Sorcerers, as in... The ones from the old stories? The sham?”

“They thought their runes could divine the future. They were wrong. But their runes invoke real magic.”

Atsumu furrows his brows. “That’s a little different from what I read...”

The sorcerers, according to a passage in an obscure book titled _Tales of the Land_ that Atsumu found in a dusty corner of the Inari Archives a few years ago, were a group of wild magic users. Their magic could summon mythical creatures, transform animals into humans, move mountains and rivers, but it was as unpredictable as it was powerful. He remembers this not just because it was outlandish, but because he was searching for the _Annals of Magic_ at the time, and the _Annals_ chronicled the sorcerers as a group of mortals that lived about a thousand years ago and fooled the populace into thinking that they practiced a different class of magic by creating omoidean clay that demonstrated volatile magic in the presence of eternal flames. Once they were exposed as impostors, they faded away from history.

“I’m impressed you read about them at all,” Kita says. “Most people have forgotten about them.”

“So how do you know about them? Was their magic actually real?”

Kita glances at the vase of dried wild chrysanthemums on the table. “Granny told me that my ancestors descended from a line of sorcerers. I don’t know if it’s true, but it doesn’t really matter. They managed to preserve some of the runes as textile patterns, and for that, they deserve credit. Allegedly the patterns used to be dyed, but the technique was too complicated, so by the time Granny learned about the runes, it was through embroidery. You must’ve seen those handkerchiefs already.”

“Um, well, they were just sitting there...”

“It’s fine. That’s where Granny left them, so it’s where I leave them. It’s not a secret.”

“Oh... So how do they work?”

“You know about the Itachiyama magic circles, don’t you? You’re one of the elite mages or elite warlocks after all.”

“I...” The urge to clarify that he’s a warlock, not a mage, evaporates at the tip of his tongue. He shouldn’t have to explain—he’s never had to—not when summoning a flame should be like breathing, eating, and sleeping to him. He chows down the last onigiri and says, “I did think of those magic circles, but I don’t think it’s the same.”

“It’s similar. The runes specify the spells like the magic circles do, and the ink activates it. Unfortunately, it’s not clear if there’s anyone still living who knows how to make the enchanted inkstick.”

“Then how did you activate the spell for your bed? And how come I’ve never heard about this inkstick?”

“The inkstick I have is from Natsu,” Kita says after a pause to finish his onigiri. “She managed to salvage a few before her village was destroyed.”

“Wait, she’s not from here?” Atsumu asks, taken aback by the revelation as well as the realization that Kita might not have been referring to an ancient craft lost to the ebbs of time but an incident that was much more recent in regards to the enchanted inkstick.

“She’s from the village of Karasuno.”

“Oh,” Atsumu says as the various pieces of information click into place. Karasuno, located on the shores of Lake Aoba, is one of the few places that delivers inksticks as annual offerings to the Inari Palace. Most of those inksticks are reserved for the court painters, but some are bestowed on distinguished artists or members of the nobility. Atsumu has never used it before, but Suna claims it’s overrated, and no one has ever alluded to any sort of magic inherent in the Karasuno inkstick. As far as Atsumu knows, it’s not any different from other inksticks, except that the resulting ink is supposed to be darker and glossier. In fact, he might not have paid attention to the name Karasuno if there hadn’t been a peasant uprising that was then crushed in that area a few months ago.

“I know about Karasuno,” he says while he helps Kita clear the dining table. “But what’s so special about their inkstick? Nobody I know uses it for runes or whatever.”

“Karasuno produces two types of inkstick. One is the well-known Karasuno inkstick that has no magic. The other is the enchanted inkstick. Natsu said that only two elders in her village knew how to make it, but they were both killed in the uprising. She’s trying to recreate it with her knowledge of how to make the regular inkstick, but so far, she hasn’t had much luck.”

“Wait, so who uses this exactly? The sorcerers? But who are all the sorcerers?”

“There are no more sorcerers, Atsumu,” Kita says without looking up from the plates that he’s rinsing. “I didn’t believe the runes were real either until I met Natsu. Granny only knew what the runes meant and not how to activate them, so I always thought it was nothing more than folklore. Even Natsu didn’t know what the enchanted inkstick was for, initially. She just knew it was a village treasure.” Kita puts away the plates and finally looks Atsumu in the eye. “The real users of the enchanted inksticks are the elite mages and elite warlocks, otherwise Karasuno wouldn’t have kept producing those inksticks and sending them to the capital. As for who and why, that’s not for someone like me to know.”

“But—” Atsumu says, stopping Kita before he can leave the kitchen.

“You want to know how I managed to put everything together.”

“No—I mean, yes... I mean—at the rate you’re reading my mind, it’d be really weird if you didn’t figure it all out,” Atsumu huffs.

“But I didn’t figure it all out. There’s more to the runes that I don’t yet understand, but I think once we do, we’ll have a way to counter Itachiyama magic.”

“You’re trying to counter Itachiyama magic?”

“Are you interested?” Kita asks, and for Atsumu, there has never been a question easier to answer than that.

#

Kita tells Atsumu what he knows about the runes, and Atsumu spends the afternoon mulling over them while helping out with the farm.

The rune depicting a person dancing around a bonfire is the heat spell. The one with two people leaping off a rug is the levitation spell. The cow head or the scorpion turns out to be a barrier spell, although he earns a blank look from Kita when he asks whether it should be a cow head or a scorpion; it looks more like a pitchfork, Kita tells him. The rest should be transfer spells, except Kita suspects that something is missing because they have never worked.

He copies the runes onto paper to test the spells cast in enchanted ink. The inkstick Kita handed to him is coarser than regular inksticks, and it has a pearlescent sheen instead of the metallic kind present on high quality inksticks. It feels as dead as any regular block of solid ink, courtesy of his bracelet, but Kita says that it does pulse with magic, just one that’s difficult to describe. As an experiment, he also draws the Itachiyama fire spell with the enchanted ink, but nothing happens. The paper doesn’t ignite, and he doesn’t feel the magic resistance in the form of an invisible needle, but that might simply be a result of his cursed bracelet cutting him off from every trace of magic.

The runes behave like the magic circles otherwise. A boundary specifies the range of the spell, albeit it doesn’t have to be circular, while any extraneous or missing drop of ink will render the spell ineffective.

There is, however, a certain amount of inflexibility that limits the use of the runes, which Kita ascribes to their incomplete understanding of the runes. The levitation spell, Atsumu discovers in the middle of shelling chestnuts for Kita, will launch chestnuts and pebbles and twigs into the air like projectiles, but if he tries to step on the rune, he’ll lose his footing as if he’s stepping on a ball. It’s not until he decides to pluck a persimmon and a pomelo from Kita’s fruit trees that he establishes the approximate weight that works for the spell: the pomelo will tumble to the ground, but the persimmon will float above the rune.

Later in the evening, when he explains to Kita why he plucked the fruits without permission, he doesn’t get the lecture that he braced himself for, only the softest of a laugh and a shake of the head. “This isn’t fully ripe yet,” Kita says after he picks up the yellow-green pomelo and gives it a sniff. “We won’t be able to eat it tonight.”

“Yeah, yeah, laugh at me, why don’t you,” Atsumu grumbles even as he feels a surge of pride and victory for drawing a definite smile out of Kita Shinsuke, whose hands on the pomelo betray the wind, rain, and shine that the farmer has experienced in a quarter of a century.

He misses Kita the morning after, waking up instead to the sun slanting through his window and a note on the dining table. He doesn’t reheat the breakfast porridge as Kita’s note instructs him to, the idea of starting a fire without his magic a foreign one that he can’t stomach, so he eats it lukewarm while the chatter of magpies drift in from the outside.

The heating rune is another inflexible one, the temperature scalding on a stone surface, fixed. He asks Kita over lunch, which he brings out to the paddy fields this time, why the rune is carved into the panel of the bed, and learns that it’s easier for others to repaint if necessary. It’s just a pity, Kita says, that the enchanted inkstick arrived a little too late for Granny. The carving of the rune has been there for as long as Kita can remember, but without the right ink, it’s a lifeless form of art.

“Say, do you paint the boundary first or last?” Atsumu asks.

“Don’t you paint it last?”

“Yeah, because that just feels natural, y’know? But I just remembered that the Itachiyama books tell you to draw the circle first. Now that I think about it, I did that for the fire spell, didn’t I?” Atsumu mutters, fingers curled around his chin. “I’m gonna go try something out. See you later, Kita-san!” he says as he jumps up from the grass and starts running back to the house.

Kita calls out after him, and he realizes that he left the lunch basket behind. “Thanks for reminding me, Kita-san,” he says, rushing back to grab the basket.

“I said, don’t run. You just ate—”

“Yeah, I won’t!” Atsumu says and dashes off.

The Itachiyama book _The Basics of Magic Circles_ teaches that the circle defines the range of the spell and the dimensions of the intersecting polygons inside the circle. More importantly, it creates a magic space that remembers the order in which the spell components are drawn. The magic circle to create ice can easily become the magic circle to start a fire if one of the inverted triangles is drawn last instead of first. On the other hand, order doesn’t seem to matter for the runes because it’s not as if Atsumu knows if he should draw the swallow or the cow head or the tines of the pitchfork first. But what if it does matter?

He experiments with the transfer spells first, altering the order of the strokes—left to right, up to down, in to out, and in reverse—thinking that maybe the spells didn’t work because they got the order wrong. But a dozen pieces of paper later, he’s lying on the floor near the front door, head throbbing, the brush tossed onto the paper scattered around him. _Maybe the order really doesn’t matter_ , he thinks and closes his eyes for the duration of a slow inhale and exhale. The floor is cool against his back.

He stretches his fingers to reach for the brush and doodles a crooked oval on the nearest blank piece of paper. The Itachiyama fire spell and ice spell are off by one triangle, but what is the difference between the heating rune and the cooling rune? Is there a cooling rune? Maybe there isn’t, Atsumu muses as he sketches the heating rune in the oval. Just like there is no Osamu to bounce ideas off here, no ice to—

Poof, and the paper ignites. Atsumu sits up and stares at the orange flame eating away the incomplete rune, the bonfire without the person. The paper shrivels, and then the paper underneath, and then the paper nearby also starts to feed the growing flames. “Aw shit,” Atsumu mutters and almost draws on his magic to control the fire, but he catches himself in time, before the bracelet can stun him again.

“Argh!” Frustrated, he scrambles to his feet and into the kitchen where Kita keeps a bucket stocked with water. “Stupid ‘Samu, this is _your fault_ ,” he complains as he chucks the water at the fire and puts it out. Smoke fills the room. He coughs, places the bucket on the floor, and goes to open the front door when Kita pushes it open and nearly bumps into him. “Ack, Kita-san!”

Kita frowns at the smoke and peers around Atsumu to take in the wet floor and the charred paper.

“I-it was an accident, I swear!”

“What were you doing?” Kita asks in a manner that’s so mild that it’s terrifying.

“I was... I was just—I’ll clean it up right now.”

Atsumu scurries to the back of the house and returns with a rag. Kita is picking up the pieces of paper, and Atsumu crouches down across from him to mop up the water.

“Do you still need these?” Kita asks, indicating the soaked and burnt drawings in his hands.

“N-no... Um, you’re back early, Kita-san.”

“We’ve cleared all the fields for harvest,” Kita says and moves the bucket to where Atsumu is. “Now we wait for the rice grains to dry before we store some of them and send the rest to the rice mill.”

“I see...” A question pops into Atsumu’s head as he wrings the rag in the bucket. He has always assumed the answer, but the memory of Osamu commenting on a year of bad harvest resurfaces. That year, flood water from Lake Aoba ruined a lot of fields on the plains, including the ones on the land owned by the Miya family. Osamu’s expression had been complicated when he scooped up a handful of rice from one of the sacks delivered to their residence in Rinka. “Say, Kita-san.”

“Yes?”

“Who owns the fields out there?”

Kita discards the burnt paper in the trash and joins Atsumu with a second rag. “Some of them are under the Kita family name. The others belong to the Oomimis.”

“Oomimi?”

“They live ten minutes from here. Their eldest son is an aide to the magistrate of Date. He’s the one who knows how to lift the curse for you. Oomimi Ren.”

“Oh. So that’s who he is. I was wondering how you knew someone like that.”

“He’ll be here for lunch tomorrow, and will remove the bracelet for you then.” Kita finishes mopping the floor and wrings his rag. “It’s pretty fast, isn’t it? Have you thought about how you’ll be traveling back to Rinka?”

Atsumu’s mind goes blank. Kita takes the rag from his hands and drapes it over the rim of the bucket.

“It’s time to think about it,” Kita says without looking at him and carries the bucket back to the kitchen.

Atsumu slowly rises to his feet and sees the brush that Kita must’ve picked up from the floor earlier and set against the inkstone on the table. It’s the plainest inkstone he’s ever used, unadorned with carvings of clouds, orchids, and dragons common among the literati. Kita leaves the kitchen from the back door, and Atsumu tries to strip the weight from his chest with a heavy sigh. It doesn’t work. He turns to close the front door that they left open because of the smoke, but he pauses at the sight of the fruit trees and the vegetables and the autumn valley basking in a warm glow that appears to trace the aura of the land.

There’s a part of him that doesn’t want to leave. A very greedy part of him.

#

He doesn’t actually think about what Kita told him to think about. That can wait until the bracelet is no longer locked around his wrist. Instead, he volunteers to help in the kitchen and occupies himself with everything Kita needs in preparation for the Moon Festival. Picking osmanthus flowers. Peeling peanuts. Grinding rice into flour.

Kita doesn’t ask him about the runes. Doesn’t say much to him at all other than to give him instructions on what to do next. It suits Atsumu just fine. To listen to Kita scraping the seeds out of a small pumpkin. To sneak glances at Kita pitting the dates.

Ginjima stops by the next morning to deliver fresh carp, catching Atsumu in the middle of breakfast and Kita on his way back from an inspection of the rice grains drying under the sun. Kita gives him a pomelo and a pumpkin in return, and later, delegates Atsumu to wash the edamame that they picked together. The kitchen is filled with a mix of aromas from the osmanthus cake steaming on the stove to the thick carp slices sizzling in deep frying oil when Kita tells Atsumu to take a break.

“I _am_ taking a break,” Atsumu says, slouched against the counter where Kita is frying the fish.

“You’re trying to delay the inevitable.”

“I—” All the words he tries to summon melt into a loud silence that leaves with his breath. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbles as he jabs the floor with the ball of his foot.

“If it’s the inkstick you want, I can give it to you.”

“That’s not—that’s not what I want... Not really...”

“Then what is it?”

Atsumu stares at Kita and wonders if Kita is aware of how everything about him is unfair, from the way he can guess Atsumu’s thoughts to the way his hair falls around his ears. His voice too, that sometimes carries the harshness of winter and sometimes the gentleness of spring breeze. It’s unfair.

Atsumu twists the bracelet as the emptiness in his stomach gnaws at him. He wants to dig into the food around him to placate the hunger threatening to consume him, but not every dish is ready and Oomimi hasn’t arrived yet. “What if...” he says slowly. “What if that Oomimi guy refuses to lift the curse?”

“He won’t,” Kita replies. “He wouldn’t have agreed to come if he had any reservations about this.”

“How do you know? What if he’s lying and he’s actually here to capture me or something? He works for the magistrate, doesn’t he?”

“He knows you’re here. Why would he wait to capture you when you can disappear at any moment?”

Atsumu frowns as he struggles to come up with an explanation. Kita arranges the fried carp on a plate and continues, “It’s understandable that you don’t trust him or me. I still maintain that you’re free to go whenever you want, even if it’s right now. I don’t know your circumstances, so I have nothing to say to other people about you. No one will know.”

“Don’t you ever get curious?” Atsumu asks, gripping the edge of the counter.

“I do, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked you who you were the other day. But you didn’t want to answer, so I didn’t press. Do you want to tell me now?”

_Yes_ , Atsumu wants to say, except there’s a lump in his throat that’s blocking any syllable he tries to form. His fingers feel frozen around the edge of the counter. He thinks he spots a hint of anticipation in Kita’s eyes, a flicker of interest that’s then dimmed by a touch of disappointment from his lack of answer, but that might just be his wishful thinking. Kita turns away to remove the bamboo steamer from the stove and busies himself with the last dish.

Atsumu fixes his gaze on the ceiling and sighs. Maybe if there’s less to hold on to, it’ll be easier to let go.


	6. Chapter 6

Oomimi Ren arrives when they’re setting the table, a gangling man with narrow jaws and narrow eyes. He gives Kita a lacquered box that Atsumu stretches his neck to see after he hears Oomimi mention that it’s Kita’s favorite tea. _Tree Mist_ , reads the gold cursive script on the lid. It’s a mellow variety of green tea from the coastal region, known for its subtle floral taste. It’s also difficult to brew well; Osamu mocked him once for scalding the leaves in water that was too hot, infusing the tea with a bitter medicinal flavor.

“This is Atsumu,” Kita introduces, and Atsumu looks up abruptly, first at Kita and then at Oomimi.

“Atsumu?” Oomimi repeats with a slight crease in his brows.

Intuition tells Atsumu that Oomimi has recognized him somehow, although he’s not sure how. The Miya family name as well as the Miya twins are well-known within the military and the capital, but his name alone, Atsumu absent Osamu, shouldn’t be enough to reveal who he is—unless it’s the cursed bracelet. Two days have passed since he stepped foot in Date after all, long enough for new storms to rip through the royal court and uproot old orders.

“Right so,” Oomimi says, brushing aside whatever he was going to say initially. “Shinsuke told me about your bracelet. It shouldn’t be too hard to remove, so why don’t we do it right now? This way we can fully enjoy our lunch.”

There’s a faint smile on Kita’s face. “That sounds like a good idea. What do you think?” he asks Atsumu.

_It can’t be this easy_ , Atsumu thinks as he pushes up his sleeve and holds out his arm with the bracelet. Oomimi is taller and standing between him and the front door. The front door is closed. There’s an unlit candle on the table next to the door, and a few pairs of shoes on the floor. To his side, Kita is telling him to sit down first. “No need,” he replies, eyes trained on Oomimi. It’ll be easier to handle the unexpected this way, even though he’s never fought without his magic before. He’ll wing it if he has to.

He flinches in spite of himself when Oomimi reaches for his wrist. Osamu did this too, left hand clasped around his wrist, and right hand... There’s a wide omoidean ring on Oomimi’s right thumb, brown but partly transparent, with swirls that look like frozen smoke. As Oomimi twists the bracelet and invokes the charm, another white wispy line coils around the ring as drained magic.

  
The bracelet snaps off and into Oomimi’s hand.

Magic rushes back like a river that’s breached a levee, and Atsumu staggers as countless memories roar by, creating a gust that sucks the breath away. And then it’s quiet again when his body finds the balance and his lungs refill with air.

Beneath it all is a different kind of quiet. The quiet of moonlight. Kita’s hand is on his shoulder, a force to anchor him where he faltered. An aura that’s gossamer yet everywhere now that he’s finally come into contact with it. _It’s not enough._

“That’s why I told you to—” Kita’s voice breaks off. He lifts his hand off Atsumu’s shoulder, as sudden as someone who’s touched a flame. “To sit down,” he says, frowning at the spot where his hand was.

It’s not fear in Kita’s expression. It’s uncertainty. The uncertainty that people have when they aren’t sure if they like something or not, and it stirs a sinking feeling in Atsumu’s stomach. He has no idea what his aura is like, but if it’s anything like Osamu’s, it’s powerful. Enough for him to sense Osamu’s presence from the other side of their estate in Rinka. But Osamu’s aura is more than that. It’s the persistence of heartbeats, the familiarity of one’s shadow, the turbulence under a calm surface. None of which helps him imagine how Kita perceived his aura or why it led to that reaction, however.

“Are you alright?” Oomimi asks.

“Yeah,” Atsumu replies and, seeing the bracelet in Oomimi’s hand, snatches it from Oomimi. “Just so you don’t get the idea of putting this on me again,” he mutters as he stuffs it into the pocket behind his lapel. It’s a lie, but he’s not in the mood to explain why he doesn’t want the bracelet to fall into the possession of others. He watches Kita head to the kitchen with the box of tea.

Oomimi chuckles. “Why would I help you take it off just to put it on you again?”

“I don’t know. People change their minds.”

“Though I have to admit you’re the first person I’ve met who’s decided to hold onto the bracelet. Usually they want to have nothing to do with it anymore.”

Atsumu shrugs. He might’ve shared their sentiment if the synthetic omoidean contained someone else’s memories. Might’ve chosen to endure the pain of burning through the intense magic of living memories to free himself from the curse. Because at the end of the day, synthetic omoidean is still omoidean. They crumble into dust once their magic is depleted.

“How do you make those bracelets anyway?” Atsumu asks.

“What makes you think I know how to make them?”

“You’ve dealt with the people who’ve had to wear them. You have to know something about them.”

“What if I tell you I don’t actually know as much as you might think?”

“Something is still something,” Atsumu says, convinced that whatever Oomimi knows, however limited, will be an invaluable piece of information nonetheless. His task now is to obtain it from the mage who’s eyeing him with caution.

“Come and eat,” Kita says as he brings out a tea set from the kitchen.

It’s an ordinary clay tea set that’s sat in a corner of a shelf, untouched by dust like the rest of the house even though Atsumu has never seen it used until today. He wonders how often Kita drinks tea, if he only drinks tree mist tea. Atsumu doesn’t have the patience to give tea the care that connoisseurs demand of the nobility, but he’s certain that Kita does. The house itself is imbued with that level of care, one that he feels in his bones now that his magic is back. There’s care, there’s composure. There’s something else as well, but it’s a whisper, too hushed for him to identify.

“It’s been a while since I’ve sat here like this,” says Oomimi, seated on the third bench that Kita brought out of storage earlier and placed along the outer edge of the table. He picks up his chopsticks.

“Two years,” Kita says as he pours everyone a cup of tea. “It was before you were married.”

Atsumu bites into a piece of fish and studies the two people in front of him, intrigued by the exchange. There’s a story between them, weaving through space like the steam from the tea that Kita brewed with magic, and it’s not a simple one.

“You were the one who made the osmanthus wine that year,” Oomimi says before taking a sip of his tea. “But I thought it was your granny and ended up praising the wrong person.”

“You did,” Kita says, smiling at the memory. “There’s no wine this year, but you can try guessing which of these dishes I made and which ones Atsumu made.”

“What? I didn’t make any—” Atsumu’s voice trails off when he catches the glint in Kita’s eyes.

Oomimi hides a snort of laughter behind his fist, failing to disguise it as a cough. “Shinsuke was trying to pull my leg. How’d you fall for it first?”

“Huh? He was what?” Atsumu gapes at Kita, who’s eating edamame as if he’s done nothing like teasing.

“To be honest,” Oomimi says to Kita, his tone shifting, “I was worried it’d be a difficult Moon Festival for you this year, but I see I was wrong.”

“It _is_ a little strange without Granny, but I should be the last person you need to worry about.”

Oomimi looks like he’s about to disagree, but he sighs and takes a bite of his rice instead. Whatever he’s thinking—remembering—is a pull on the residual emotions buried in the walls around the house. Grief that broke into fragility. Tears that no one could wipe away. Closure that was left on the floor. It’s a slow emergence, but it makes Atsumu acutely aware of how present they are and yet how absent they are. He wouldn’t have sensed them without Oomimi’s otherwise unremarkable aura acting as a strum on a tight string. Nothing shows on Kita’s face. It’s like he’s standing in a place far from the shores of desolation, the same place where mischief is a rippling mirage, where it’s easier for dawn and dusk to meet than it is for strong emotions to rain across the landscape. A place hidden from Atsumu.

“You should worry more about yourself and your family,” Kita tells Oomimi. “I heard you didn’t go home for dinner these past two days because you were too busy.”

“How did you hear—it was the chatty housekeeper, wasn’t it?”

“Date hasn’t had any serious crisis since Moniwa Kaname became magistrate, so what’s going on? Even Atsumu told me that he saw something the other day.”

“Oh yeah,” Atsumu says around a mouthful of pumpkin.

“You were in Date?” Oomimi asks, a little surprised.

“Two days ago. Saw this woman hitting the drum. Then the pawnbroker got arrested for some reason.”

“I can’t believe you saw that,” Oomimi mutters, rubbing his temple. “It was supposed to be a simple case. The woman accused the pawnbroker of omitting one of the necklaces from her loan slip so he wouldn’t have to return it when she went to pay off her loan. She said she didn’t realize it at the time because she never learned how to read. The pawnbroker, on the other hand, insisted that everything was accurate on the slip, meaning the woman never pawned a necklace like that. Well, one of them had to be lying.”

“Wait, that woman hit the assembly drum just because of a loan slip?” Atsumu asks in disbelief.

“That’s the crazy part. Our magistrate office is open every day at ten to the people who have something to report, but Moniwa is too nice of a person, so he asked to see her right away even though the guards already told her to come back later. He was afraid it might not be that simple if she was willing to sound the drum. In some ways, he was correct, but not in the way you might expect.

“We couldn’t find any conclusive evidence either way, so the pawnbroker told us we should just cast the truth spell. The problem with the truth spell is that the caster will know the truth, but the caster could still lie, so it can’t serve as definitive evidence. And the magistrate can’t be the caster because there’s the risk that the other party will do the same when they make aura contact, which could grant them access to court secrets. So we weren’t planning to do this anyway, but the woman refused before we could say anything. Her reasoning was that the spell would manipulate people’s memories. She said we’d change her memories to prove the pawnbroker innocent. That’s just an absurd claim.”

“This woman sounds like a nutcase,” Atsumu remarks. “I bet she’s the one who’s lying.”

“Well, we had no proof of anything, so the only thing we could do was to set it aside for the time being until we come across new evidence. The next day, the woman was claiming that Moniwa was a corrupt magistrate neglecting the people, by declaring this out loud over and over again while kneeling in front of the magistrate office. It was a spectacle. Moniwa didn’t know what to do, so I decided to dig into this woman’s background. You know what I found? She met with this Itachiyama merchant several days ago. This merchant happened to be a potential spy that we’d been watching, but by the time I uncovered all of this, the woman was gone. The guards said she fainted, and someone from her family took her home, but we haven’t been able to track her down. Moniwa doesn’t want us to investigate further because of how tense things are with Itachiyama right now. So that’s where we are.”

Refilling Oomimi’s tea, Kita observes, “That’s quite the development.”

Atsumu taps his chopsticks against his bowl, done with his meal. Something about the case bothers him. The woman seems crazy, but she’s acting with an agenda. Itachiyama has always been interested in the Inari omoidean supply, one of the largest and the best in the world, so it makes sense for them to target mining towns like Date. If the woman’s plan was to cause trouble for the magistrate of Date, why would she randomly bring up the idea of memory manipulation? It’s wholly unrelated and doesn’t accomplish anything. Was she panicking?

“What if that woman wasn’t referring to the truth spell?” Atsumu asks, looking at Oomimi. “What if she was referring to the cursed bracelets?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she thought you were going to turn her memories into synthetic omoidean. If she loses all her memories, how’s that different from changing her memories?”

“But that’s a totally different spell.”

“She can’t read, right? So she can’t be that well-educated in magic. Maybe she mixed up the two. I mean, no other spell really comes up in the judicial system.”

“But that can’t be it. There’s no—we have no way of creating synthetic omoidean in Date.”

“What? Why not?”

Oomimi purses his lips as he considers how to respond. “It’s not in the power of the local courts to carry out this kind of sentence. Even if that woman did do something to warrant such a sentence, we’d have to transfer her to the highest courts, whereupon they would take over. We wouldn’t have a say in it.”

“You mean that’s the proper protocol,” Atsumu says, bitterness rising. He rubs his right wrist as a reflex only to discover and remember that the bracelet is no longer around his wrist. “If your local magistrate is what this woman tried to make him be, he’d do it just to shut her up.”

Oomimi pauses. “Except that’s really not possible.”

“Why not?” Atsumu all but snaps. It’s not about the woman anymore, or the magistrate of Date, or even what Oomimi knows about synthetic omoidean. It’s about his brother and himself. Osamu may not have been the one who cast the spell to create the synthetic omoidean, but he’s the one who made it possible. And for that, Atsumu can’t forgive him.

Kita speaks up, addressing Oomimi. “Why don’t you tell him? He knows about the runes already.”

Atsumu blinks. Runes?

Oomimi sighs. “I guess I should’ve expected.” He glances at Atsumu. “It’s actually a rune that creates the synthetic omoidean, not a mage. I’ve never seen the rune up close, but even from a distance, you can tell how complicated it is. Given that you need to get the pattern right, _and_ you need the enchanted inkstick, _and_ you need ghost fire all together, it’s not easy for anyone to replicate the rune without the royal court hearing about it. There’re only two of those runes in the entire kingdom. One is in Rinka, and the other is in Tachibana. So you see, even if we wanted to create synthetic omoidean in Date, it’s impossible.”

Atsumu stares at Oomimi and then at Kita as the words sink in and coalesce with what Kita told him the other day. _The real users of the enchanted inksticks are in the capital._ “You knew about this,” Atsumu says.

“I knew about the rune, yes,” Kita replies.

“But you said you didn’t know.”

Kita’s gaze lands on him, piercing. “You have your secrets. I have mine. I didn’t really know you at the time. I had no obligation to share them with someone who could be anyone.”

“But you told me anyway.”

“I told you about the runes in general because I didn’t consider them to be secrets. In fact, it’s not every day that I’d get an elite warlock asking about them, so I wasn’t going to let that chance go, even if there was a chance that you’d dismiss them as nonsense.”

“But—” Atsumu starts to argue before a single word catches up to him. The last time Kita mentioned it was in conjunction with its counterpart, but not anymore. “How did you figure out that I’m a warlock?”

Kita doesn’t take the sip of tea as he intended, lips hovering over the edge of the cup. His grip shifts. He sets the cup back on the table and says in a voice that’s infinitely softer than the ruthlessness of logic, “I came into contact with your aura earlier, didn’t I? No mage will have an aura as fiery as yours, no matter how powerful they are. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”

“Ah,” Atsumu says and wonders if Kita has also deduced his magic element. _Fiery, huh._

“Is there anything else that you think I should’ve told you but didn’t?” Kita asks as if challenging Atsumu to push the boundary that cannot be moved, to cross into the territory that cannot be negotiated.

_Not yet, anyway._

Atsumu shakes his head—not because there isn’t any and not because he doesn’t dare. All his life, he’s demanded more than people can give without considering how much he’s putting in, but with Kita, he’s beginning to recognize that he can’t put in too much and he can’t put in too little, whether it’s material or immaterial. It was that way the day they met, and it continues to be that way. He gets what he gives, but conversely, he has to give what he’s ready to take. If he plows ahead now, he’ll run smack into a wall and wind up with a broken nose, but that doesn’t mean he’ll admit defeat. He’ll do whatever it takes to venture into the realm sealed off from him, in order to find out everything about Kita Shinsuke.

And he will succeed.


	7. Chapter 7

Kita heads out with Oomimi after lunch—something about the deeds that Oomimi needs Kita to review. As they stroll down the path, shadows short and behind them, Atsumu watches from the doorway, arms crossed and back against the door frame. Oomimi glances over his shoulder once, in Atsumu’s direction, and Atsumu narrows his eyes even though it doesn’t help him listen in on their conversation. He scrubs the sole of one of his shoes against the edge of the step, idly wondering if he too can share the path with Kita one day, side by side. If he didn’t know Oomimi was already married (and expecting his first child as Atsumu learned toward the end of lunch), he might have been jealous of what Oomimi has with Kita. A relationship built on time and trust. Trust that Oomimi would undo the cursed bracelet for Atsumu with no questions asked. Trust that allowed Kita to hear about the rune to create synthetic omoidean, which is a secret that not even someone like Atsumu can pry out of the elite mages.

Atsumu pulls the bracelet out of his pocket and runs his fingers across the omoidean links. Without the curse, they feel lighter, warmer, brittle. He pauses on the two chipped like broken ice. The snapshot he saw back in Rinka, right as he grabbed Osamu’s collar, fist raised, was one of himself lying in the snow, exhausted but grinning at Osamu holding out a canister of hot soup for him. They were eighteen. Osamu had ribbed him for being a stubborn fool and pushing his powers to the limit in a wintry environment, but there was none of that mockery overlaid with the snapshot, only an obstinate affection.

He tucks the bracelet away and decides to go for a walk, following a path that extends to the mountains. At first he’s tailing Kita and Oomimi, but he doesn’t take the turn where they do, toward the large house with a gray tiled roof. He passes patches of wild chrysanthemums, yellow and purple, interspersed with clusters of foxtail grass. A flock of sparrows chirrups in a thick bush. In the distance, the wind ruffles the tall reeds around a pond, freeing tufts of flowers from the undulating sea of gold glowing under the sun. The magic here is a susurrus of life, floating by like the wispy clouds high up in the sky.

Atsumu kicks a pebble down the narrow path winding towards the pond. It forks near a small stream a few dozen paces down, with the path on the right leading up to a thatched cottage that has smoke rising from its chimney. Its front yard is full of shrubs and flowers. A few ginkgo trees in the back have littered the ground with golden leaves. There’s a faint scent of mint. An orange cat meows and saunters across the garden. If the magic around the village is the routine of cultivation, the magic around the cottage is a routine waiting to be broken. Whoever lives in the cottage uses enough magic to disrupt the flow with eddies of conflicting emotions, and Atsumu doubts it’s a peasant farmer.

Later, after Atsumu has circled around the pond, he runs into one of the farmers who worked the fields with Kita, a boisterous auntie on her way back from the pigsty, who tells him that the cottage belongs to a healer named Yaku Morisuke. “He moved here, what, two, three years ago?” she says. “A real blessin’, I’m tellin’ ya. After Shin-chan’s parents died, we never got a healer in the village. Always had to travel miles to find one from the next village over. ‘Twas real terrible when my boy fell out of a tree and broke his arm—”

A healer would explain the magic. They’re mages who dip into the pain of their patients and negotiate their way through hope and despair to treat illnesses and heal wounds. As it doesn’t always succeed, it inevitably stirs up an imbalance in the air.

Atsumu thanks the auntie, but not before she leaves him with a tale of how her nephew fell into a paddy field and emerged a mud man. Her laughter rings down the path, and Atsumu, restless, continues in the opposite direction, toward the bamboo grove. He estimates that he’s been wandering around for almost an hour. Kita should be back by now, shouldn’t he?

He slows down in front of the house when he spots Kita sitting at the stone table near the osmanthus tree, sifting something in a shallow basket. The scene should be a portrait of the mundane, but in that moment, he thinks he can understand why so many poets throughout the ages decided to capture the idyllic rural life in verses about the house behind scattered sunlight and the doorstep cleared of moss.

It’s this.

He pushes open the gate, and Kita lifts his gaze. Atsumu flashes a smile and pretends not to notice the way Kita stares at him as he heads over to the stone table. “What’re you up to?” he asks, taking a seat on the stool next to Kita, resting his arms on the table. The basket is filled with osmanthus flowers.

“I thought you might’ve left,” Kita says in response.

Atsumu’s heart skips a beat as he tries to decipher the undertone in Kita’s voice. “I-I won’t leave without saying anything,” he rushes his words and squirms in his seat. His foot brushes against Kita’s, but by the time he registers it, Kita has already shifted his foot away.

“I see,” Kita says and continues to sift through the yellow osmanthus flowers, picking out unwanted bits.

“So what’re you doing?” Atsumu asks again, leaning forward, pressing against the edge of the table. He doesn’t mind Kita moving his foot away from him. He doesn’t mind at all.

“I decided that I should make osmanthus wine. I wasn’t going to, but when I came back earlier, I saw the flowers and thought it’d be a pity to let the bloom go to waste. It was Granny’s favorite.”

Atsumu makes a thoughtful sound and says, “I want to try it.”

Kita gives him a skeptical look. “The wine won’t be ready tonight. It’s drinkable after a week, but it takes at least three months for the flavor to come out. It’s best after one year.”

“I can wait,” Atsumu declares, even though he knows he has to leave for Rinka some time in the next few days, even though Kita has never invited him to stay after today.

“Weren’t you going to go back to Rinka?”

“Yeah, but I can come back.”

“In a year?”

“In...” Atsumu frowns. That isn’t quite what he had in mind, but he isn’t sure what he had in mind either. He wants to say _in a week_ , but there are fifty-two weeks in a year, so he has to pass the time somewhere, somehow. With Kita. Without Kita.

As usual, Kita seems to know where his thoughts are going because what he says next is both gentle and cruel: “You don’t belong here, do you, Atsumu?”

“I belong where I belong,” Atsumu mumbles, refusing to look at Kita.

He’s happiest when he’s immersed in magic. Learning. Playing. Honing. The day-to-day here has been a shelter from the storm, but the worst will pass eventually, and the novelty will wear off whether or not he’s ready to admit it. Kita wasn’t wrong to think that what Atsumu wanted was the inkstick. The runes are abstract—they can go anywhere. But the rebellious part of Atsumu, the part that’s not able to ignore the cool space Kita leaves behind to put away the basket of flowers, wants to keep the runes here. How else is he supposed to share what he learns with Kita?

So he goes back into the house while Kita works in the yard.

He pauses after he picks up the inkstick. There is indeed magic emanating from it, and it is, as Kita said, difficult to describe. It reminds him of the prosperity that once lit up Rinka with thousands of lanterns during the largest festival of the year, but it also contains the sufferings strewn across burnt and frozen fields from centuries ago when the kingdom was split into two, five, seven. It has everything in between, vast but vague, like dreams that blur together until there’s no more before or after.

It’s a stark contrast to the hum he heard when he held a bottle of Itachiyama ink in his hand. There is no magic resistance either (this time for certain) after he grinds the inkstick into ink and starts to draw the runes. Instead, it feels more like he’s tapping into the magic flowing around him, but the usual currents that surge through him have subsided into wavelets curling around his toes.

He only feels it if he draws the boundary first, however. _Activation_ , he realizes after he draws the bonfire part of the heating rune without the boundary. Drawing the boundary first and then the dancing person and then the bonfire gives the heating rune. Drawing the boundary first and then the bonfire creates a flame. But he gets the same if he draws only the bonfire and then the boundary. He dismisses the flame with a flick of his hand and stares at the paper rune with a hole burned in the middle.

The boundary must be the component to activate the spell enclosed within it. The bonfire is the spell to start a fire, while the bonfire plus the dancing person is the spell to create warmth; the dancing person alone isn’t a spell. Drawing the boundary first will activate whichever spell is completed first, so order only matters if there are two competing spells, but order is an illusion, at least for the runes, because it makes more sense to complete the spell before activating it. Are the Itachiyama spells different or was the Itachiyama book misleading?

Atsumu throws away the burnt paper without making further progress for the rest of the afternoon. He tells Kita about it over dinner and says, “You don’t have Itachiyama ink, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I know I should have some at home,” Atsumu mutters, faced with a second reason to go back to Rinka. Kita doesn’t say anything, but his expression says he knows what’s coming. Feeling small, Atsumu says, “Gin mentioned there might be merchant ships going up to Rinka. Do you know anything about them?”

“There should be a ship that picks up passengers from Date around noon every day.”

“Oh...”

“Oomimi is leaving for Date tomorrow morning. He might be able to give you a ride.”

Tomorrow is too soon, Atsumu wants to say. Why are there ships every day? Why isn’t it once per week, and he just conveniently missed the one this week? But at the same time, he knows he has to go back at some point. Every heartbeat that passes is a slough off the hours—the hours he gets to spend with Kita, and the hours he needs to unravel everything that went wrong with Osamu.

“If...” he says after he helps Kita clear the dining table. “If there’s a rune to make synthetic omoidean, do you think there’s one to reverse it?”

“Reverse, as in, turn the omoidean back into memories?”

“Yeah.”

Kita hands him a plate of mooncake and leads the way to the stone table outside, where they can see the harvest moon rising from behind the mountains. He pours two cups of tea. “What makes you ask?”

“It’s just... The bracelet...” The omoidean chain in his pocket seems to be pressing against his thumping chest, hot and cold. He works his mouth. “It’s my brother’s memories.” His voice cracks.

“What?” For once, Kita sounds startled.

“It’s my twin brother Osamu’s memories,” Atsumu says, kicking at the ground.

Is Osamu also watching the moon rise, he wonders. In Rinka, but more so for the two of them, the Moon Festival is mainly an excuse to eat. A tavern is only as good as the warm pastries and fresh fruit it serves alongside the magic riddles they hide in the lanterns hung up for the festival. There is no worship of the moon rabbit as there is in the northern garrison towns, where peddlers sell colorful rabbit figurines for the townsfolk to enshrine. There are also no festivities as there are in Tachibana, crowding the bridges across the city with people lighting incense towers and sky lanterns.

Here, there’s only a chorus of crickets and bamboo leaves occasionally punctuated by the merriment of children chasing the moon across the harvested fields. The mooncake is a little too thick in texture, but the tea tastes like it’s brewed from the dew that forms on morning blossoms. Not even Osamu can draw out this kind of flavor that is there and not there. Together with the osmanthus, it’s an aroma that will undoubtedly slip away from the conjuring mind once it’s gone, waiting to wash up like opal shells along the River of Oblivion.

“Granny often told me that the spirits are just lonely,” Kita says. “They just want us to remember them, so if we talk to them, listen to them, they’ll return what they took from us.” He starts to sing: “O lonely ones, you find our memories, all that we’ve forgotten; those bits and pieces, you leave ‘em on the cliffs, hide ‘em in the mountains; so hark, young’uns, hop in your lil’ ships, go visit the gardens, then light up the heavens, with eternity and impermanence; together, we awaken from oblivion.”

“I’ve never heard the full song before,” Atsumu says, struck by Kita’s voice adding a dreamlike quality to the simple melody.

“Granny often sang it to me when I was young, but she stopped after the Itachiyama troops destroyed the Temple of Impermanence.”

“What? Why?”

“The song is about the Temple of Impermanence. Granny took me there once when I was nine. She told me that the temple is where you go to talk to the spirits. There was a garden behind the temple. It was very beautiful. I didn’t know it back then, but I think the stone pavement might’ve been the carvings of a rune. I never saw it used, but if you think about what Granny told me and what the song implies—visit the gardens at the Temple of Impermanence, light up the heavens with the eternal flames, and ‘awaken from oblivion.’ I wouldn’t be surprised if that rune restored memories.”

Atsumu jumps to his feet, then slumps back down on his seat. “I think I get it now. Itachiyama burned down that temple over ten years ago when they were making their way to Rinka, so the rune’s probably destroyed.” He pauses. “Are you sure it restores memories? From omoidean?”

“No. It’s purely a wild guess on my part. I don’t want to give you false hopes, but I didn’t want to keep it from you either. I see now why you wanted to hold on to that bracelet.”

“Wait, hold on. If the rune’s made of stone, it’s entirely possible that it’s still intact,” Atsumu mutters, his mind whirling. “Have you been back to the temple after it was burned down?”

“No.”

“So we have no idea what it looks like now... It’s east of Rinka, right? Guess I’ll have to make a trip after I get back.” An idea hits him. “Hey, do you want to go with me, Kita-san?”

“No. There are still things I need to tend to regarding the harvest. And no, even if you wait until I’m free, I still don’t want to go. I don’t really want to see the ruins of the temple.”

“Ah,” Atsumu says and fiddles with his teacup. He supposes he was foolish to think that he could spend more time with Kita that way.

“It’s getting cold,” Kita says as he gathers the plates and the cups. “Let’s go back inside.”

#

It takes Atsumu a long time to fall asleep that night. The covers are too warm, the air too chilly; he needs a drink of water, he drank too much water. But eventually he drifts off, blanketed in moonlight mingling with motes of calm. Kita’s calm.

Dawn breaks too soon, and not long after, he’s following Kita down the path to Oomimi’s house. Oomimi is already outside, helping his wife into a carriage. Atsumu adjusts his makeshift knapsack, a large cloth bundling his spare clothes and some food, and strides ahead to stand facing Kita. The strong wind twirls golden ginkgo leaves around them, musses Kita’s light gray hair that seems tinted with the color of fire.

“Can I...” Atsumu says. “Can I come back here?”

“Why do you want to come back here?”

“Why...? Why, ‘cause I wanna.”

“That’s not answering the question.”

“Sure, it is.”

Kita sighs. “I told you, you can take the inkstick with you.”

“And I told you I don’t wanna.”

Atsumu’s heart is racing, afraid of what Kita will say next. He didn’t say no right away, but he didn’t say yes either. Instead, he’s contemplating Atsumu, like a sage contemplating the absurdities of humankind.

“If you find yourself back here again,” Kita finally says, “you can knock on my door.”

The last few words are as surreal as they are real, and Atsumu can’t help but smile. “I’ll be back. Just you wait,” he promises.

“Don’t make the Oomimis wait for you,” Kita replies, indicating the carriage.

Atsumu glances over his shoulder and sees Oomimi peeking out of the carriage window. “Um, right,” he says and turns back to Kita. “Well then, I guess I’m off.”

“Be careful.”

“I will. I’ll be back,” Atsumu repeats as he heads toward the horse carriage, tripping over a piece of rock protruding from the ground while his eyes are fixed on Kita. When he comes back, he thinks as he hops into the carriage, he’ll say everything he couldn’t say before and do everything he couldn’t do before.

He leans out of the window as the carriage drives off. Kita’s figure, obscured by the dust clouds kicked up by the wheels, grows smaller and smaller until the path bends and a forest takes his place.


	8. Chapter 8

Both Oomimi and his wife are watching him when he peels himself away from the window. Oomimi’s wife, a dainty woman whose pregnancy is just beginning to show, lowers her head to hide a smile and busies herself with sewing a baby gown.

Oomimi asks, “Why are you going back to Rinka? Wouldn’t it be better for you to stay here?”

“I have things I need to do,” Atsumu mutters. “What about you? Why’re you going back to Date already? Don’t court officials have three days off for the Moon Festival?”

“There are still some loose ends related to the case that need to be taken care of, along with some other work that piled up as a result. To be honest, I might not have made this trip if not for Shinsuke’s request, but it was a worthwhile trip.”

“Um, I haven’t thanked you yet, have I?”

Oomimi chuckles. “Shinsuke already did on your behalf.”

“Oh, of course he did... So then, are you also doing this for Kita-san?” _Like Ginjima?_

“For Shinsuke?”

“Yeah. I mean, why else are you helping me?”

“I see what you’re asking. Yes and no, I suppose. I don’t think I would’ve helped you if it wasn’t Shinsuke who made the request, but it’s not really because of Shinsuke that I decided to do this at all.”

“No? Then what is?”

Oomimi twists his omoidean ring and exchanges a glance with his wife. “Let’s just say that I wish for my children to grow up in a kinder world.”

His words end with an inaudible sigh, a mix of resolve and resignation. Atsumu wonders what a kinder world would look like. Is it one where cursed bracelets don’t exist? If so, would Osamu still betray him? Would he still be able to meet Kita Shinsuke?

“Do you know why Kita-san decided to help me?” he asks Oomimi.

“Why are you asking me?” Oomimi asks in return, amused. “Why didn’t you ask him?”

“Well, I tried and—” And Kita’s answer was like the opening of an abyss that Atsumu didn’t know if he was staring into or out of. In the days without his magic, he had hated the bracelet, hated Osamu, but he had never once thought that the bracelets shouldn’t exist. It’s the only way to restrain someone’s magic, and history is rife with the devastation that comes with magic warfare. The lightning warlock that led a rebellion and scorched the earth, the mages who spilled blood across the land, vying for power.

Atsumu knows how easy it is to set a city ablaze and how difficult it is to treat a person’s frostbite, but it’s the latter that he’s tried to do, that he prefers to do, having pestered a senior military healer to teach him after he discovered that it’s possible for fire warlocks to draw a trickle of magic to warm instead of burn. He also knows that not every fire warlock is like him—not the arsonist whose fire he halted a few years ago, not the child whose fire he extinguished a little too late because no one taught the child how to control their flames. The bracelets are perfectly acceptable, until they’re not.

“Okay, let me ask you a different question,” Atsumu says. “Why would you help me because of Kita-san? It doesn’t really have anything to do with your kinder world, does it?”

Oomimi considers Atsumu’s question for a moment and replies, “Shinsuke is good at reading people. If he thinks someone needs help, they need help. Although I did ask him why he decided to help you, since I didn’t expect him to go this far without knowing who you are. He told me you looked really lost when he met you, so even though he hadn’t intended to help you beyond giving you some food and drink, he didn’t want you to leave still looking like a child who can’t find his way home.”

“I—I’m not a child,” Atsumu protests, but it’s a weak protest as he blinks rapidly to get rid of the prickly feeling in his eyes. He’s not a child, he’s not lost, he knows where home is. Except it’s all wrong. “Is that why Ginjima thought I was a stray Kita-san picked up?” he asks.

“Oh, you’ve met Ginjima,” Oomimi says, then pauses. “I guess so. I thought you were one too.”

“But I’m not?”

Oomimi shakes his head. “I’m not sure you want to be one either.”

“No, not really,” Atsumu says slowly, frowning. He has no interest in being one of many, no matter what a stray is, but he has a suspicion that a stray means something else to Oomimi. Just like he has a suspicion that Oomimi is aware of who he is. “I’ve been wondering. You know who I am, don’t you?”

It was the glimmer of recognition when Oomimi met Atsumu. It’s also the expectation that Kita should know who Atsumu is, and the surprise that he didn’t. Oomimi’s wife looks at them with wide eyes, as if the question is a strange one.

“Yes,” says Oomimi. “I know who you are. I am the aide to a magistrate, after all.”

Atsumu heaves a sigh and leans against the back of his seat. “So they did issue an order against me. Why did you still help me then?”

“I already told you, but I also thought Shinsuke knew at the time.”

“But he didn’t. Did you tell him afterwards?”

“No. Or rather, he didn’t let me say. He said if he were to find out, it should be from you. I guess you still haven’t told him.”

“I will,” Atsumu mumbles in a sullen voice. “So what did the order say? You know it won’t be so easy to detain me now, right?”

“I don’t intend to. And it’s a secret order, so I’m afraid I can’t say anything further.”

Atsumu rolls his eyes with a huff and looks away, but later, when Oomimi is talking to his wife about the errands that they need to run after they return to Date, Atsumu wonders if it’s because of his wife that Oomimi didn’t want to disclose the order that he’d defied. They’re treading on thin ice, and Atsumu has to stare out the window to stop himself from asking if Oomimi regrets his decision. It’ll be like asking if Kita regrets his decision, and for all his fears, Atsumu can picture Kita leveling an unimpressed gaze at him upon hearing that question. He hopes he’s right. Because he’ll choose it again: following Kita down the dusty path, past rice fields and bamboos, into a simple house that kept him fed and warm and safe.

#

It takes them more than three hours to reach Date via the mountain roads. Clouds are gathering by the time Atsumu thanks Oomimi for the ride and heads toward the docks. He weaves through the laborers loading raw omoidean onto one ship and unloading salt from another, and manages to secure a ride to Rinka with the salt merchant. He’s eating the last of the onigiri that Kita packed for him when the ship sails past a village with a familiar bamboo grove. A farmer balancing two pails on a yoke is trekking past the fields that are now bare and brown. Atsumu wonders what Kita is doing, if Kita will see this ship. He wonders how soon he can return.

The crew and the other passengers largely leave him alone throughout the journey, especially after the glare he sends an over-friendly passenger who tries to approach him with a bottle of cheap alcohol. He falls asleep to the sound of the crew drinking and gambling, and wakes up to the smell of broiled fish. It begins to drizzle when the crew is navigating the rapids that sometimes prevent ships from traveling to and from Rinka during the summer, through the infamous Ghost Valley. On his way down, Atsumu was only able to hear the howl of the wind and the water and the thought that he can’t die here; but now, as he peers through the mist from the cabin door, he hears the cries of those who perished here, their fear dredged up from the sediment, sprayed onto the grottos and the statues of the four gods carved into the cliffs that sometimes glow blue, sometimes yellow, sometimes not at all. There’s a commotion below the deck as one passenger begins to panic, and Atsumu can’t wait for the ship to enter the calm waters not far from Rinka.

The sky is leaden and the ground is muddy from the rain earlier when the ship arrives at the Rinka port. Besides the laborers dripping with sweat and rainwater and the hawkers grilling skewered meat under an awning, the port is bustling with unease. Atsumu sees why once he rounds a corner piled with sacks and crates, stepping from pier to land. An Itachiyama naval ship is docked at the other end of the harbor, with colored flags flapping in the wind that always remind Atsumu of half-ripe bananas. He knows from Aran that Itachiyama naval ships have become as permanent as omoidean merchant ships in Tachibana, but this is the first time he’s seen one in Rinka. He doesn’t think he could’ve missed it from Kita’s village if it sailed up the River of Oblivion. Did it come through the canal that joins the River of Oblivion and the River of Dawn that flows to the East Sea? Why? Is it because of the Itachiyama envoy who died in a fire? It has to be, and the royal court must’ve conceded again like the weak, incompetent bunch that they are. He was so preoccupied with the bracelet Osamu slapped on him that he forgot about this incident even though it’d rocked Rinka the morning after it’d come to light.

_Stupid ‘Samu_ , Atsumu thinks as he marches into the capital city. _Stirring up shit just when Itachiyama is trying to stir up shit. Who’s the one who didn’t want war to break out again?_

He splashes through puddles until the mud path turns into paved stone at the city gates. Sentries patrol the top of the city walls that bear the red and black flags of the Inari Kingdom, but neither the sentries nor the tall, thick walls can keep out the damp chill left by the rain and social decadence. It drips from the eaves of teahouses and brothels, seeps through the walls of academies and infirmaries, dampens the finesse of artisanry but not the wretchedness of poverty. Such is Rinka today, in the midst of composing its last song and performing its last dance. The rain may have stopped, but by the time Atsumu reaches the inner city where the Miya estate is, he feels drenched to the bones anyway.

The usual crowds out working, shopping, and socializing in the outer city have been thinned by the rain, but the inner city is quieter. Atsumu used to think that this quiet is the quiet of pride and sophistication from the noble residences and government bureaus, but after experiencing Kita’s quiet, he finds this to be smothering, like a heavy wet blanket thrown over smoldering embers. He shivers and draws another pulse of magic to warm himself, but the magic itself seems to be a cold fog passing through him.

At last, he sees the walled compound of the Miya estate at the end of the wide street. The bold strokes of the family name Miya on the plaque adorning the roofed gate are equal parts valor and glory, unchanged like the twin fox statues guarding the entrance. He takes the front steps two at a time only to be stopped by one of the guards who sees his nondescript commoner outfit first before recognizing his face.

“Osa—Atsumu-sama?”

“Yeah, that’s me. Now let me through.”

The guard is still gawking at him like a goldfish before he hears the command and snaps his mouth shut. He bows and pushes open the heavy doors despite the question marks written over his face. At least it’s not reluctance, Atsumu thinks as he enters the estate. Whatever Osamu was trying to accomplish hasn’t turned the entire household against him, it seems.

Not much has changed in the estate. The front hall for hosting guests remains unused, its doors closed. The camellia shrubs planted around the courtyard are green as ever. Osamu doesn’t seem to be around. Atsumu frowns. He cuts across the courtyard and takes the corridor to the east wing where his room is, pausing in the middle to address a servant who’s as surprised as the guard to see him.

“Where’s ‘Samu?”

“Osamu-sama went out.”

“Yeah, I figured that. I’m asking where he went. When’s he coming back?”

“He did not say.”

Atsumu dismisses the servant with an impatient wave and pushes open the door to his room. His gaze rakes over the low table, the bookshelf, the chest of drawers, the closet, the bed, the drapes, the decor, and finds everything in its place. He drops his knapsack onto the cushion beside the low table and lights the brazier on the floor with a conjured flame. It’s mid-afternoon, but he’s hungry already, having only eaten some gruel on the ship hours earlier. He heads to the kitchen at the back of the estate, where the cook nearly knocks over a basket of eggs upon seeing him before heating him a few meat buns while he chows down some of Osamu’s onigiri—because there’s always some, and he deserves some.

(He won’t admit he’s missed them.)

Osamu being away throws a wrench in his plan, which is to confront Osamu and improvise the rest. So he returns to his room to pack instead, but fatigue catches up to him from the cramped horse carriage and the dank ship cabin and the long trek across the city. The memories of home also leap out in a way they never have before, as if the brazier is burning not regular flames but eternal flames. The books his parents gave him, the coat he borrowed from Osamu, the drawer that refuses to shut properly because Osamu cracked it even more when trying to help him fix it. He ends up dumping everything he intends to bring with him onto the floor and collapses onto his bed, sapped of strength.

He dreams that he’s looking for Osamu, who snuck into enemy territory to steal a map but never came back. He’s running through a garrison town, trying to evade capture, but the air grows so viscous that he can barely lift his legs.

The door flies open, the loud crash jerking him awake. He burrows under his blanket with a groan, but someone yanks the blanket away and seizes his collar.

“What are you doing here?” Osamu hisses.

“Wha—? Ugh, can’t you let a guy sleep? I’m tired as fuck,” Atsumu complains as he tries to wrestle his collar out of Osamu’s grip. Osamu shoves him away, and he rolls onto his other side, pulling the blanket over his head with a huff. He almost drifts off again when a voice pipes up in his head, warning him to be wary of Osamu. He sits up and glares at Osamu—or tries to, anyway, given how heavy his eyelids are. There’s not enough light to catch Osamu’s full expression, but the room is charged with so much anger and frustration that they’re fueling Atsumu’s own irritation.

Osamu looks up from the messy pile of clothes and books on the floor and asks, “What is this?”

“None of your business. Now get out so I can go back to sleep. I’m too fucking tired right now.”

Osamu stares back at him, a reflection that isn’t, never was, and never will be, despite the identical eyes, eyebrows, nose, and mouth. The restraint that Osamu shows others is a facade that Atsumu casts aside. Words that rush out of Atsumu’s mouth tend to lie dormant behind Osamu’s eyes, until there’s no more room to hide them and they erupt like steam in a sealed kettle. Osamu’s lips curl. “You’re crazy,” he spits out and turns to leave.

“You’re the crazy one!” Atsumu shouts after him, and the door slams shut. Letting out a guttural sound, he bunches the blanket into an angry heap, but there’s no one to lob it at, so he buries his head under it as he throws himself back onto his bed. His muscles ache everywhere, and blood is pulsing in his ears. Sleep has slipped away. He blinks at the darkness under the blanket and then at the night descending on his room. Outside, the patter of rain rises above the silence.

He coils magic around the candles in his room, sparking them to life, and lies in the orange glow for a few more seconds before pushing himself out of bed. Osamu has left him alone for now, but who knows what he’s really up to. Atsumu glances at his belongings on the floor and decides to finish packing lest he’s forced to leave again on short notice. A few casual outfits, a winter cloak, the two books he has on Itachiyama magic, a bottle of Itachiyama invocation ink, brush and paper, all the money he has in notes and coins, bundled with what he brought back from Kita’s place, minus the original silk outfit he wore. He’s tying his knapsack when he recalls that he doesn’t know the route to the Temple of Impermanence. There should be a map of that region in his parents’ study.

He’s rummaging through the drawers in the study for the right map when he senses Osamu’s approach. He looks over his shoulder just as Osamu pushes the door open, this time less forcefully but enough for the candle flames to shudder in the draft nonetheless. Osamu has changed out of his earlier formal robe that he dons only when he has to meet important people, switching it for a lighter, plainer outfit that he can wear into the kitchen.

“You’re like a thief,” Osamu says in disdain.

“No, I’m not,” Atsumu retorts. “A thief snoops around in the dark. I’m borrowing, not stealing.”

_You never return what you borrow_ , is Osamu’s gripe every time he grabs something from Osamu’s room. It’s as habitual as greetings and farewells, so it’s disorienting when Osamu doesn’t say it but replaces it with, “What are you trying to do?”

Brows furrowed, Atsumu looks up from the map of the Lake Aoba region and swaps it for the next map in the drawer. “I’m looking for a map.”

“For what?”

“For—none of your business.”

“Okay, you know what’s my business? You coming back. What on earth are you thinking?”

“What am _I_ thinking? What are _you_ thinking? Why the fuck did you put that bracelet on me?”

“That bracelet—how did you take it off? Do you know what that bracelet was for?”

Atsumu crumples the cloth map in his hands and draws a deep breath through his nose. “Are you going to tell me the bracelet was supposed to protect me or some other bullshit?” he asks in a cold voice.

“It was supposed to buy you time, but none of that matters anymore.”

“Hah. Buy time for what?”

Osamu pulls a face like he’s been reasoning with a mule. “I’m going to say this very slowly so a dumbass like you can understand. The only way Suna could stall the royal court from detaining you for killing the Itachiyama envoy was to send you away, but your aura is too easy for an elite warlock to pick out, so the bracelet was the only way to make you disappear. The royal court doesn’t want an investigation, so Suna doesn’t even have the time to prove your innocence unless he tries to create it.”

Atsumu gapes at Osamu, all traces of fury wiped out by stupefaction. “Wha—what’re you talking about? The Itachiyama envoy? What does that have to do with me?”

Osamu opens his mouth to respond, but then he frowns. Hesitant confusion swirls in his aura, which, as the tempestuous anger fades away, strikes Atsumu as oddly erratic. Osamu’s aura has always been like water, whether he’s genuinely calm, pretending to be calm, or in the middle of an outburst. Water that can’t splinter, that glides together even when a vortex forms. But right now, his aura is stirring shards that remind Atsumu of broken omoidean pieces.

“I don’t know what you did or didn’t do,” Osamu says. “But the fire that killed the Itachiyama envoy had a magic source. You’re a fire warlock, and someone saw you meeting with the envoy that day.”

“Huh? I never... What day was that? It was... I was home that whole day. You were the one who went out.”

“No, I was home. You went out.”

“What? No. _You_ went out. _I_ was home.”

“Whatever. Even if you were home, no one in this household can be your alibi. And everyone knows you have a history of lying.”

“I do not!”

“Says the liar,” Osamu mutters. “So how did you take the bracelet off? It couldn’t have been Mom or Dad or Aran-kun, because it would’ve taken you more than a week just to get to them.”

“Hmph, not telling you.”

Atsumu studies the wrinkled map in his hands. The Tenko Mountains. The Temple of Impermanence is at the base of the southernmost peak. In the lower left corner is a square marking the location of Rinka. This is probably the right map. It pisses him off that Osamu predicted where he would’ve gone for help if he hadn’t met Kita. Does Aran know about this? Do his parents know?

“Where’re you trying to go?” Osamu asks as Atsumu rolls up the map.

“Why should I tell you? You didn’t tell me anything.”

“Because you wouldn’t have gone along with it if we told you.”

“Damn right, I wouldn’t have. Nobody is allowed to take my magic away, no matter what the reason is. If the royal court wants to fight me, I’ll fight them. I don’t care.”

“Do you realize that it’s not just about you? It affects everyone around you. The royal court is going to recall Mom and Dad from the northern border because of you. I was running around all day, trying to—”

“They’re what? Are they nuts? They can’t recall Mom and Dad from the northern border. That’s the only reason Mujinazaka hasn’t tried to invade in the last ten years. Because of Mom and Dad.”

“But you couldn’t keep your mouth shut the other day and insulted the entire royal court in front of the Itachiyama envoy when they were just about to make some progress with the talks. Now the Itachiyama envoy is dead, the talks are off the table, and everybody is pinning this on you.”

“The talks shouldn’t be happening in the first place. You know the outcome if they signed the treaty, and you hate it as much as I do. Don’t think I don’t know just because you didn’t say anything.”

“That was the only way to avoid a third war with Itachiyama. We can’t afford another war. Now the only way to avoid it is to hand you over, but they couldn’t do that, so they’re targeting Mom and Dad instead. Don’t you get it? Our political enemies are targeting the entire Miya family at this point.”

“How is that _my_ fault now? That was you and your stupid idea to put the bracelet on me. Itachiyama has always wanted another war, but the buffoons in the royal court were too dumb to see that. Now we have Mujinazaka to worry about, no thanks to you. Or was it Suna?” When Osamu looks away without saying anything, Atsumu shuts the map drawer and marches out of the room, knocking into Osamu on his way out. He’s going to have to pay Suna a visit in the morning.


End file.
